What twenty years in the fitness and wellness world taught me about stress, cortisol, and the weight that will not shift
For almost twenty years I lived and worked in the health and fitness world, training women and men of all kinds. These days I do not teach. I train for myself, in my own practice, several mornings a week. And yet the same quiet conversation still finds me, whether from the women I work with or from someone beside me at the studio. A woman who is doing everything right. She eats well. She moves her body. She is disciplined, often more disciplined than anyone around her. And still the weight will not shift, especially around her middle, and she cannot understand why. She has been told, in one way or another, that she simply needs more willpower or a stricter diet. After all these years of watching this struggle in so many bodies, I want to offer her, and you, a completely different explanation. Because in my experience the real reason is almost never willpower. It is the nervous system.
I knew, even in my earliest years in this work, that the nervous system was quietly running the show. Not only for our weight, but for our health, our energy, our relationships, our sense of safety, even our relationship with money and with life itself. Everything we experience runs through it. And nowhere have I watched that truth reveal itself more clearly than in the bodies of women who could not lose weight no matter how hard they tried.
The body in survival mode
To understand why a body holds on to weight, you have to understand what it is doing when it is under chronic stress. It is not relaxing. It is not restoring. It is surviving. When stress becomes constant, the body shifts into a state designed for emergencies, the state we often call fight or flight. And a body in survival mode has one priority above all others, to keep you alive. It is not interested in letting anything go. It is interested in holding on.
At the centre of this is a hormone called cortisol. In short bursts, cortisol is helpful and healthy. It wakes you in the morning and helps you rise to a challenge. But when stress never switches off, cortisol stays elevated for far too long, and the system that controls it, often called the stress axis, stops winding down the way it should. A major 2024 review in the journal Clinical Obesity placed this stress response system at the very centre of how chronic stress disrupts metabolism and changes the way the body stores fat.
Why the weight settles where it does
What many women find most frustrating is where the weight tends to gather. The arms, the legs, even the face may change, while the midsection stays exactly the same. There is a clear biological reason for this. The deep fat that sits around the organs, in the abdomen, carries a far higher number of cortisol receptors than the fat stored elsewhere in the body. So when cortisol is high, it binds more readily there and signals those cells to hold on. Stress quite literally tends to settle around the waist. Landmark research from Yale found that even lean women who were more vulnerable to stress carried more abdominal fat and produced consistently more cortisol than women of similar weight who were not under the same strain.
There is more. Elevated cortisol also drives cravings, and specifically cravings for quick, dense energy, the sugar and the comfort foods we so often blame ourselves for. This is not a lack of discipline. It is a hardwired instruction from a body that believes a threat is coming and wants fuel within reach. And when stress disrupts your sleep, as it almost always does, the hormones that govern hunger and fullness shift as well, so that you feel hungrier and less satisfied. None of this is weakness. It is a body doing precisely what it was designed to do under threat.
The softest place we guard
There is something else here, beyond the biology, and I think you already know it in your body. The belly is the softest part of us. It is the one place we have no bone to shield, the place an animal curls around when it is frightened, the place we instinctively cover when we feel exposed. It is also where we feel almost everything first. The flutter of nerves, the knot of dread, the drop of bad news, the warmth of being truly held. We say it without thinking. A gut feeling. Butterflies. Something we cannot stomach. The body has always known that the belly is where so much of our emotion lives.
And just as the body must digest food, it must also digest experience. The things we feel and cannot fully process, the fear we swallow, the grief we never let ourselves cry, the words we did not get to say, do not simply disappear. They settle, and they wait, and very often they wait here, in the belly, the body’s oldest holding place for what it has not yet felt safe enough to feel.
Seen this way, the weight that gathers around the middle is not only chemistry. It is also a kind of tenderness. The body building a soft wall around its most vulnerable centre, an armour over the place that feels everything, because somewhere along the way it learned that this part of you needed protecting. The body is not failing you. It is guarding the softest part of you in the only way it has known how.
Why willpower and dieting backfire
Once you see this, you understand why the usual advice so often makes things worse. When a woman whose body is already in survival mode responds by restricting harder, dieting more strictly, and pushing herself further, her nervous system does not read this as discipline. It reads it as another threat. More pressure, more deprivation, more stress. And so the body does the only sensible thing it can under threat. It holds on even tighter.
This is the cruel loop so many women are caught in. The harder they fight their bodies, the more their bodies brace. You cannot force a frightened body to feel safe, and a body that does not feel safe will not let go. This is why the answer is not more willpower or a harsher plan. It is the opposite. It is learning to work with your body rather than against it.
Working with the body, not against it
This is where somatic and nervous system work comes in, and it looks nothing like fighting your body. It works gently, and it works at the root. It calms the fight or flight response, so the body is no longer living in a state of emergency. It releases the tension and the bracing the body has been holding, sometimes for years. It supports the natural regulation of your hormones, which allows your metabolism to work the way it is meant to rather than in constant defence. And perhaps most importantly, it slowly reconnects you to your own body, to your real hunger and your real fullness, so that you can begin to trust your body’s signals again instead of overriding them.
This is the part most approaches miss entirely. They go to war with the symptom, the weight, while leaving the cause, the chronically stressed and unsafe nervous system, completely untouched. Somatic work does the reverse. It does not attack the weight at all. It addresses the reason the body felt it had to hold on in the first place. And when that reason begins to ease, the body is finally free to respond.
- What I have watched happen
Here is what I have seen happen, over and over, across nearly two decades of this work. The women who carried weight they could not shift very rarely came to me to lose it. They came because they were exhausted, anxious, stretched thin, dysregulated. We worked on their stress, their breath, their nervous systems, their capacity to feel safe. And somewhere in that process, without it ever being the goal, they began to say the same things to me. I feel lighter. My clothes are fitting differently. People keep telling me I look well. My body is changing. They were not fighting their bodies harder. They had simply, finally, stopped fighting them at all.
I think of one woman in particular, though I will keep her anonymous, because her story belongs to so many women. She came to me successful, capable, admired, and quietly exhausted. She had tried everything with her body, every plan and every discipline, and the weight around her middle would not move no matter what she did. She did not come to me for that. She came because she could not switch off, could not sleep, could not remember the last time she felt at ease. We never once worked on her weight. We worked on her nervous system, on helping her body feel, perhaps for the first time in years, that it was safe. Months in, almost in passing, she mentioned that her clothes had started to fit differently, that people kept asking what she had changed, and that she felt lighter in a way she could not quite put into words. Nothing about her diet had changed. Something about her sense of safety had.
I want to be honest about what matters most in those stories, because it is not the dress size. The change in their bodies was only ever a side effect of something far more important, a nervous system that had come out of survival mode. What these women noticed first was never the weight. It was that they could breathe again, sleep again, rest without guilt, and feel at home in themselves in a way many of them had not felt in years.
Far more than weight
I want to be honest with you about something, because it is the deeper truth underneath all of this. None of it was ever really about weight. The weight is simply one of the most visible ways a body shows us it has been living in survival for too long. The very same state that makes the body hold on also frays your sleep, drains your energy, tightens your relationships, and quietly erodes your ability to rest, to receive, and to feel close to the people you love.
Your nervous system is not running only your metabolism. It is running, in some quiet way, almost everything. Which is why, when it finally begins to feel safe, far more changes than a number on a scale. The whole of life begins to soften, because the system beneath the whole of life has at last been allowed to settle.
Where to begin
So where does this begin, in a real and ordinary life. Not with another plan to follow or one more thing to get right, but far more gently than that. It begins with giving your body small, repeated signals that it is safe.
You might start with your breath, letting the exhale grow a little longer than the inhale for a minute or two, because a slow exhale is one of the most direct messages of safety the body knows. You might begin to notice, without judgement, where you brace and hold through the day, the jaw, the shoulders, the soft of the belly, and let those places ease when you catch them. Or you might choose one small thing your body can rely on each day, a few quiet minutes that belong only to you, and keep them. None of this is dramatic. But to a nervous system that has been braced for years, these small and steady signals are everything. This is how a body slowly learns that it no longer has to hold on.
When the body finally trusts
Because that is what is really happening underneath all of it. When we allow the nervous system to slowly build a sense of safety, often a safety it never had the chance to build in the first place, the whole body begins to change its posture toward life. It stops bracing. It begins to trust. And a body that trusts it is safe no longer needs to hold so tightly to anything, including the weight it was only ever carrying to protect you.
So if you are the woman I am describing, doing everything right and quietly wondering what is wrong with you, I want you to hear this. There is very likely nothing wrong with you at all. Your body is not betraying you. It is protecting you, in the only way it has known how. And the moment it begins to feel genuinely safe is the moment it can finally let go of what it has been carrying for you all this time. The weight was never the real problem. It was only ever the messenger.
If something in you recognised itself in these words, let that recognition be the beginning. You do not have to force your body, and you do not have to do this alone. This is the work I do with women, helping the nervous system find its way back to safety, so that the body, and the life around it, can finally soften. When you feel ready, I would be honoured to walk that path with you.
*The research behind this article
Van der Valk and colleagues (2024 to 2025). Glucocorticoids and HPA axis regulation in the stress and obesity connection. Clinical Obesity, a comprehensive review placing the stress response system at the centre of how chronic stress affects metabolism and fat storage.
Epel and colleagues, Yale University: stress vulnerability, elevated cortisol, and greater abdominal fat, including in lean women.
On abdominal and visceral fat carrying a higher density of cortisol (glucocorticoid) receptors, and cortisol driving central fat storage and cravings for high energy foods: established endocrinology and obesity research.
On stress, disrupted sleep, and shifts in the hunger and fullness hormones: established research in metabolism and sleep science.
A 2025 review on stress induced metabolic disorders linking prolonged cortisol and catecholamine release to insulin resistance, visceral fat, and inflammation.
