How Your Stress Organs Make You Fat, Bloated, and Toxic

The following is adapted from Dirty Girl.

To understand how stress impacts your body, let’s take a look at what I call the Holy Trinity of Stress Organs: the liver, adrenals, and gut. Sure, you’re living in the twenty-first century where the odds of being eaten alive by a saber-toothed tiger are relatively slim.

However, your body’s stress response hasn’t caught up with your modern-day lifestyle. So when your boss yells at you, or when you get a call from your child’s teacher, or when you watch the news on TV, your body responds as if it’s about to be attacked by that tiger. To protect your life, the Holy Trinity of Stress Organs kicks in the fight-flight-or-freeze response.

The Liver Stops Detoxing

Your liver stops focusing on toxin removal and releases stored glucose into your bloodstream so that you have energy to escape the “wild animal.” After all, that tiger is about to eat you! You need to run and run fast. To do that, your muscles need fuel. And sugar is a great fuel.
So the liver yells, “Stop the presses!” and shuts its detox factory down in order to churn out sugar in the form of glucose. Once the sugar gets going to fuel your run, the liver will start producing cholesterol as a backup fuel. How surprising is that? Your liver creates the things that make you fat or prone to a heart attack in response to stress.

The Adrenals Shut Down Digestion

Unfortunately, if you’re not running away from that tiger in real life, and instead are in a meeting, chewing on the inside of your cheek while your a**hole boss blames your team for something you didn’t do, then instead of using up all that sugar and cholesterol to escape, your body stores it in fat. New fat. Fat that usually finds a home around your midsection — you know, in the muffin-top area.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with the liver’s efforts to save you, the adrenals turn on their cortisol factory and pump that hormone into your bloodstream. During times of stress, cortisol focuses on getting that glucose rushing through your system and on shutting down what it deems nonessential-for-the-moment bodily functions. So cortisol shuts down your digestive system, and then the energy that would be required to digest food is diverted to your legs, so you can run. Your immune system, reproductive system, and growth process also shut down until the immediate threat to your endangered life has passed.

The Gut is Stuck With Rotting Food

So while the liver and adrenals are focused on getting you the h*ll out of Dodge, the gut is feeling like an ignored stepchild. Without the liver and pancreas providing the required resources to break down food in the belly, and because cortisol has shut down any hope of emptying whatever is there anyway, the gut is stuck with food rotting in it.

Sometimes it’s unfortunate that we’re not being chased by prehistoric predators — our modern stress doesn’t always have a neat and tidy end. Instead, we leave our nasty boss to fight traffic all the way home, where we deal with the angry teacher call, worry about our parents’ health and our children’s futures, and fear the stock market and worldwide calamities that the news media keep showing us. All the while, we’re juggling the carpool, making dinner, finding last-minute supplies for science fairs, and doing yet another load of never-ending laundry.

The Stress Has Got to Go

So, for us, in our busy lives, our stress sometimes doesn’t seem to end — it’s chronic. And now, because we’re not burning off all that new sugar and cholesterol in flight, the fat grows and the body processes remain slow or even stop. To make matters worse, when stress is prolonged, the liver just doesn’t have the resources left to deal with the toxins that are coming into our bodies. And all that rotting food wreaks havoc on our digestive system: nutrient absorption is impaired, bad bacteria thrives in our intestines, and gas is produced.

But it gets worse! See, the way your body naturally detoxes stuff is by making it easier to eliminate. And yes, by eliminate, I mean pee, poop, or sweat, which requires toxins to be water-soluble. Unfortunately, most toxins and hormones are fat-soluble. When your body is fully functioning, not overburdened, and not overstressed, your liver has the ability to attach a methyl group (this is a fancy term for one carbon molecule that’s connected to three hydrogen molecules) to your toxins and hormones, which makes them water-soluble. You then dump those methylated items into your urine or stool, or you sweat them out.

In short, all that stress makes us fat, bloated, and toxic.

For more advice on how you can manage your stress, you can find Dirty Girl on Amazon.

Husband-and-wife team Wendie Trubow and Ed Levitan are physicians and functional medicine practitioners with more than thirty-five years of combined experience in the medical field. Their first functional medicine practice became the largest in the nation during its time. Eight years later, they launched their membership-based wellness organization, Five Journeys, where they focus on the integration of five core areas of health to create comprehensive, individualized wellness plans for their members. Ed and Wendie live in the Boston area with their four kids, two cats, nine chickens, and, of course, their sauna, the newest addition to their family!