Your Midweek Wellness Reset with Nurse Georgie

📌 Episode Summary:
In this mini but mighty episode, we’re joined by wellness expert and hormone specialist Georgie McNiff to talk about a topic that so many of us struggle with—stress and its hidden impact on weight, hormones, and overall energy.

Georgie breaks down how chronic stress throws off your cortisol levels, disrupts sleep, spikes inflammation, and causes stubborn weight gain—especially around the midsection. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We also get into practical, bite-sized tools you can use today to calm your nervous system, support your metabolism, and feel more like yourself again—without adding more stress to your to-do list.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why your body holds on to weight during high-stress periods
• The connection between cortisol, insulin resistance, and belly fat
• How adrenal fatigue shows up in everyday life
• Why quick-fix diets don’t work when your hormones are off
• Simple ways to reset your nervous system in 5 minutes or less
• Nutritional and lifestyle shifts that support healthy weight loss naturally

🛠️ Quick Tools + Takeaways:

• Breathwork resets (2-3 minutes a day)
• Caffeine cutbacks to reduce cortisol spikes
• Adaptogens and supplements Georgie recommends for stress and weight balance
• How to create a “nervous system friendly” evening routine
• Foods that stabilize blood sugar and help reduce cravings

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

So we are here again with Nurse Georgie McNiff and today we are going to talk about a health tip that she wants to share with us that creates overall wellness and really you know, can make a huge difference in your life. Definitely. Thank you so much. Yeah. I love having you here. I love, love working with you. It has been fun. It's been super fun. I think that my number one health tip for this year has been stress management. When our cortisol levels are chronically high, it makes it impossible, number one, to lose fat. And so, you know, a lot of my clients, I would say 95 5% come in and they want to lose, you know, however much weight it is, but they want to lose weight. So that's number one. If your cortisol levels are constantly high, you're always storing fat. You're never in fat-burning mode. And how do we get to that level of stress where the cortisol starts packing on the pounds? Yeah, I mean, just total mismanagement of self-care activities, lack of sleep, not meditating, not exercising, things of that nature can kind of allow these... levels of cortisol to rise over time. Cortisol is a steroid. As many people know, what happens when you take steroids, you retain water, you gain fat. Steroids cause this water retention and for our bodies to pack fat away, primarily in our belly. That's why you hear the term cortisol belly. That's not all that's bad about cortisol. When you're taking steroids, what else do they do? They're immunosuppressants. And so if your cortisol is constantly high, chronically high, you're retaining water, you're putting fat in your belly area, and you're also suppressing your immune system. And that's why people who are chronically stressed end up getting sick more than others and can even develop more serious ailments like cancer and autoimmune disease. Wow. So can you give us three ways to reduce cortisol? in our daily lives that you recommend for your patients? I typically recommend that people do some form of meditation daily. I know it's not like a fancy biohack, but it's the most effective thing that you can do to bring your cortisol down. And that would be like deep breathing and calming of the parasympathetic nervous system and rewiring of the parasympathetic nervous system you are your own most important tool in getting your system out of fight or flight and producing less cortisol. That's number one. And then number two, um, adaptogenic herbs, and melatonin. Melatonin inhibits production of cortisol at the level of the adrenal glands. So if you are someone who's been thinking about using melatonin and you're having a hard time kind of like slowing down at the end of the day, I'll even tell people to start taking melatonin around 6 or 7 p.m. instead of right before bed just so that they start lumping that cortisol response that might have been high for them all day. Well, it's interesting. After we had our last podcast together, I tried the melatonin right after the girls got home and I passed out on the couch, like had to go to bed right when they went to bed and I was just like a wreck. So we need to build it up, right? So like build up a little bit of a tolerance or maybe my body was just like, oh my God, you need to rest, get to bed. It's the latter. It's when you are constantly like running high in cortisol and you're in go, go, go mode and then you shut down your body's cortisol all of a sudden you can relax. And that's why melatonin helps with sleep. Melatonin doesn't directly put you to sleep. Melatonin relaxes your body and your brain and calms your adrenals down enough so that you can sleep.