Why Emotional Health Matters for Your Metabolic Health

INVESTING IN YOUR EMOTIONAL HEALTH 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s a great time to take stock of your mental health and think about what kind of support could improve it—just like an annual physical. 

At Calibrate, we think of managing stress as a critical factor to your success. Food, sleep, exercise, and emotional health are the pillars of the Calibrate program because they are the crucial elements that work together or against each other to define the state of your overall health. Each pillar has a cause-and-effect relationship with the other three. To build a sturdy table, you need four solid legs.

Emotional health: The not-so-secret metabolic health optimizer

Calibrate is firmly rooted in science: real data that offers real results. And our data tells us that poor emotional health is directly linked to poor metabolic health. That’s because your mind isn’t separate from your body—it’s part of the same system, and to heal that system, you need to optimize all the parts.  

When it comes to emotional health, it’s simplest to think in terms of stress. When you experience stress—whether it’s from work, family, your relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, or anything else—there are physical repercussions for your body. Stress causes your body to overproduce hormones like cortisol, which cause you to store energy as fat and contribute to food cravings. 

Modern realities vs. actual bodies 

To understand how powerful the connection is between metabolic health (including but not limited to weight) and emotional health, let’s first think about what our bodies are and aren’t designed for. 

Our bodies haven’t changed much in tens of thousands of years, so the cues that tell us that we are safe and well look much more like the cues we encountered when we were safe in the natural world. These include a diet rich in whole, unprocessed foods; total darkness for sleep; regular movement that invigorates the body without injuring or exhausting it; and stretches of time to recharge. When these inputs are in place, our bodies can achieve balance, which allows us to enjoy nourishing food, sleep well, move with vigor, and experience contentment. 

In the modern world, however, our bodies often end up getting different inputs. When the environment consists of things like sugar and crash diets, lack of sleep, long days spent sitting, and lots of stress, emergency responses are triggered in our bodies. Perceiving that something is terribly wrong and that we should hoard resources to survive, we go into crisis mode, producing stress hormones that have us craving high-calorie foods and storing energy as fat. That’s how we end up in looping cycles of chronic stress/poor metabolic health (and that’s why diets are so often counterproductive).

Celebrate mental health awareness by investing in yourself.