Yes. Yes yes yes yes. At least that is what I personally think.
I wish it were just as simple as, no matter what else is happening in your life, if you are eating the 500 calorie diet you will consistently lose weight. But that is just not so.
This question came up in relation to the following events going on on the hCGer’s life:
“So this has been very difficult phase 2 for me! I finally got my dosage right at 125. But then last week my dog and I were attacked by another dog while we were out on a walk! Because I am still recovering from my car accident and brain injury, it really set me back with my brain, and I had to be hospitalized for a day. So with that being said, I have not lost weight in a week.”
When you are super stressed, whether it’s crazy events like this, or just a super stressful time at work, your cortisol levels rise in order to handle this – this seems to prevent weight loss (which is why once you in the stage of adrenal fatigue where you have low cortisol levels that can’t rise to stress, you just can’t handle stress anymore and fall apart completely. Me raising my hand over here).
I don’t have any concrete evidence for you at this time, I can’t find studies that really support this. Nevertheless, enough of us women have experienced it in the real world to know SOMETHING happens when there is too much stress going on in our body or life that causes sometimes very long stalls.
I want to give you my own experience that’s connected with this topic- now I know the experience of 1 person and possible factors going on at the same time that I’m forgetting about doesn’t prove anything. But I do get a certain lesson from it so I’d like to share it.
I have been crossfitting for 7 years. During that time I’ve adjusted my diet a bit here and there but overall it’s been rather the same. I’ve mostly done crossfit 3x a week most of that time. I have chronic health issues (hashimotos, lyme disease, etc) that really prevent me from doing more without feeling like absolute muck. Anyway, for a period of time I started attending 4 days a week. I seemed to be doing okay with it. Then we moved to a new area and I began attending a new crossfit gym. The workouts (we call them WOD’s – workout of day) were MUCH harder than my previous crossfit gym. They were much longer and super intense. I would say my previous WOD’s at the old place took me on average like 15-20 minutes, whereas at the new box, the WOD’s were consistently taking me like 35-45 minutes. And I was continuing my 4 days a week. Not too long after this I started to notice I was gaining weight. My eating was exactly the same as it had been. I went to have my bodyfat tested hydrostaticaly and I HAD GAINED FAT. I don’t remember exactly how many pounds but it was definitely at least 3-5 lbs of fat. This was even though I was working out MORE than I previously had been – more intense, longer, and more days. And eating clean still. The adjustments I made: I cut back to 3 days a week again, and capped any workout off at 20 minutes, even if I wasn’t done. I started taking a physiological dose of cortisol for my weak adrenals (in my case I had too low cortisol). I lost the fat and went back to my normal body fat percent over the next couple months.
To me this shows that our hormones play a powerful role in how our bodies react to weight loss and getting fit efforts. If we don’t respect our hormones, we will not get to our goal. Sometimes it’s just not the time in our life to be pursuing weight loss. Some stressors come on us that we do not have control over and it may be best to wait until the main difficulties related to those events pass before attempting something like hCG. Sometimes this might happen in the middle of a round. If so, do not feel bad or guilty or like you’re quitting if you need to abort that round early to handle the other matters and come back to this weight loss journey when the circumstances are actually in favor of you achieving your goals. While timing may never be perfect, and I’m not saying you should wait for this, I’m also saying there are time when you are literally spinning your wheels in your efforts if the circumstances are REALLY off, and in these cases, it makes much more sense to put it off.
