Is Cortisol the Reason You’re Gaining Weight? Probably Not

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Today’s Health Upgrade

Mindset
Why Life Can Feel Wrong Even When You Know What Matters

You can have people you love, work that matters, and a clear sense of what you want from life. And still, it can feel as if none of it fits together.

That feeling has a name: coherence. And new research suggests it might affect more than your state of mind.

Researchers followed about 1,500 midlife adults for nine years. No one had chronic pain at the start of the study. The researchers measured three parts of a meaningful life: purpose, mattering, and coherence.

Purpose is having direction. Mattering is believing your life counts. Coherence is the sense that your experiences and the world around you make sense.

People with a stronger sense of coherence had somewhat lower odds of developing chronic pain over the next decade. They also reported fewer headaches, backaches, and joint pain. 

The pattern remained after the researchers accounted for depression, anxiety, BMI, other health conditions, and several factors that could influence pain.

Purpose and mattering showed no such relationship.

Because this was an observational study, it can’t prove that coherence protects against pain. It also doesn’t mean pain is “in your head.” 

But it raises an interesting possibility: The way we process and understand our lives might be connected to how we experience physical distress.

Purpose gets the TED talks. Mattering has often looked more important in studies of meaning. In one preregistered study, mattering predicted how meaningful people later judged their lives. Coherence didn’t.

That difference helps explain why coherence is easy to overlook. It might not be the part of meaning you feel when life is going well. You notice it when life stops making sense.

Coherence is the sense that your experiences fit into an understandable story. A loss, diagnosis, divorce, layoff, or move can disrupt that story. Your values haven’t necessarily disappeared. The life around them has changed faster than your understanding.

That can create a particular kind of disorientation. You know what matters but no longer understand how the pieces fit.

The distinction also changes what might help. 

A hard season doesn’t always require a new purpose or a dramatic reinvention. Sometimes you need time to process what happened and see which parts of your life still hold.

And maybe the best part is that coherence doesn’t seem fixed. In a recent study, older groups tended to report more of it. Because the researchers compared different age groups at one point in time, they couldn’t show that coherence improves as any one person ages. But the finding means that making sense of life may become easier with experience.

You don’t have to force that understanding today. If you need a place to start, write down what you know, identify what remains unresolved, and stop before reflection turns into rumination.

Together With Our Place
Are Nonstick Pans Really That Dangerous?

I’ve seen you talk about different pots and pans before. I know you have a sponsor. But what’s the real science and concern? Are nonstick pans really that dangerous? I thought there's no more Teflon, so shouldn’t it all be fine?

Yes, full transparency, we do have a cookware sponsor. But that was after years of testing pots and pans, and coming to two simple conclusions:

An intact nonstick pan is considered low-risk for everyday cooking. But the claim that “there’s no more Teflon” mixes up two different chemicals.

Teflon is a brand name for PTFE, the slippery coating still used on many nonstick pans. PFOA is the “forever chemical” behind the lawsuits and alarming documentaries. It was once used to manufacture PTFE, but major manufacturers phased it out under an EPA program completed in 2015.

That removed a known hazard from PTFE production. It didn’t eliminate PTFE, which is why many nonstick pans remain vulnerable, especially if you cook under certain conditions or damage pans with your utensils. 

The finished coating appears to pose little risk when the pan is intact and used at normal cooking temperatures. PTFE is a large, stable molecule that the body isn’t believed to absorb. If you accidentally swallow a small flake from a scratched pan, it should pass through you rather than build up in your tissues. 

The clearest kitchen risk comes from overheating, cooking at higher temperatures, and using less durable pans that get beat up over time. 

At very high temperatures, PTFE begins to break down and release fumes. An empty nonstick pan left over high heat can reach it surprisingly fast. Those fumes can cause a temporary, flu-like illness known as polymer fume fever and can even be fatal to animals. We are not animals, but it gives you a sense of why some experts suggest limiting exposure.

Badly damaged pans raise another question. An earlier study estimated that a single scratch could shed thousands of microscopic particles, and a badly broken coating up to millions. The researchers don’t yet know whether swallowing those particles causes harm. That’s enough reason to replace an older pan, but it isn’t proof that a scratch is poisoning your dinner.

So, no, nonstick pans aren’t as dangerous as some suggest. They also aren’t indestructible and risk-free.

If you don’t want to replace your pans, keep the heat at low or medium, and never leave an empty nonstick pan heating on high. Use stainless steel, cast iron, or carbon steel for searing, broiling, and other high-heat cooking.

If you want to reduce your exposure, that’s why we recommend Our Place. As two guys who cook for our wives and children at home, we need something that cooks well, cleans easily, and gives us peace of mind.

Look back at the advice above, and you’ll notice almost all of it is a rule. Keep the heat at low or medium. Never leave it empty on the burner. Go easy with the utensils. Grab a different pan when you want a real sear.

None of those rules are hard. But your pan sets them, not you. And at 6pm, with the kids asking when dinner’s ready, you slip up.

That’s why we cook on the Titanium Always Pan Pro. It has no coating at all. The nonstick effect comes from the titanium surface itself, pressed with a microscopic texture and wrapped around an aluminum core and stainless exterior. So nothing can scratch through, and nothing breaks down when someone turns the burner up too far.

That removes most of the rule book. It’s metal-utensil safe, dishwasher-safe, and oven-safe well past 700°F. 

It’s a surface built to last, and it comes with a limited lifetime warranty.

Pump Club readers get 10% off sitewide with code APC. Every order includes a 100-day trial, so you can cook on it for three months before you decide.

Because sometimes the best kitchen rule is the one you never have to remember.

Health
Is Cortisol The Reason You Gain Weight?

Cortisol has become the internet’s favorite explanation for stubborn weight, and it’s mostly taking the blame for things it didn’t do.

For most people, cortisol doesn't cause the scale to go up unless you have a medical condition.

Truly excess cortisol can add fat, but that’s a medical condition (Cushing’s syndrome, which is rare) or a side effect of long-term oral steroids like prednisone. Otherwise, cortisol is not the issue.

Everyday stress works in a more ordinary way. For many people, it cuts into sleep, raises appetite, lowers activity, and steers them toward easy, calorie-dense food. 

Cortisol is part of that stress response, but behavior drives the weight gain, and that’s where you have leverage.

Save your money and skip “cortisol-lowering” supplements because none have been shown to meaningfully reduce weight. You can also skip mail-order cortisol tests (cortisol swings so much during the day that a single sample tells you little). 

Instead, find the stress habit that changes how you eat. Short sleep and late-night snacking are common culprits. A meta-analysis of 41 randomized trials found people ate about 250 more calories a day when sleep-restricted.

If you have rapid weight gain, easy bruising, wide purple stretch marks, a rounder face, or new trouble getting up from a chair, see a doctor. That’s when cortisol testing is worth it.

Not So Fast
The Supplement Combo That "Boosted Power 17%" (And Why We're Not Buying It)

If a scoop of powder could give you 17% more power, you'd probably try it. 

That's roughly the pitch for a new study pairing two amino acids, carnosine and tyrosine. It's already popping up in influencer videos.

But there’s a reason we’re not jumping on the bandwagon of the supplement combination.

Researchers studied young male pro soccer players, with each player visiting the lab four times and receiving a single dose of carnosine, tyrosine, both supplements, or a placebo. An hour later, they completed an all-out 30-second bike sprint, followed by tests of sprinting, agility, passing, and focus.

When the players took carnosine and tyrosine together, peak power was about 17 percent higher than with the placebo. Their sprints were also up to 13 percent faster.

Those would be enormous improvements. For comparison, beta-alanine is one of the best-studied performance supplements, and it works by gradually raising carnosine levels in your muscles. A review of 40 studies found that weeks of daily beta-alanine supplementation produced a small performance boost.

This study suggests you can take carnosine with tyrosine and get a much larger benefit in one hour. 

When a new result challenges the best existing evidence, it needs strong methods and even stronger data. But this study doesn’t appear to do that.

Carnosine acts somewhat like a sponge inside your muscles, helping buffer the acid that builds during intense exercise and contributes to the burning sensation. But your muscles make that carnosine slowly from beta-alanine. The study's authors acknowledge that swallowed carnosine is usually broken down in the bloodstream before much of it can reach your muscles.

The dose was also small: about 450 milligrams, or less than half a gram. Your muscles already contain many times that amount. It’s difficult to explain how such a small dose could reach the muscles and increase power by 17 percent within an hour.

The paper’s internal contradictions create an even bigger problem.

Peak power increased 17 percent when measured in watts, but 25 percent when adjusted for body weight. Those percentages should be similar because the same players were tested only days apart. 

For both numbers to be accurate, the players would have needed to lose roughly 10 pounds between visits.

None of this means anyone cheated. Mistakes happen, and the study received no industry funding. 

But when a paper’s text, tables, and calculations give different answers, you can’t tell which number is correct. That uncertainty includes the headline-grabbing 17 percent.

The amount of tyrosine used also matters. An average player received about 11 grams, roughly 22 standard capsules. That dose falls within the range used in some laboratory studies, but it’s far higher than what most tyrosine supplements provide. 

For now, there are better uses for your money. Caffeine has strong evidence for improving workout performance. The usual range is 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, taken about 30 to 60 minutes before training. Start at the low end. 

Creatine can improve strength and power over time at 3 to 5 grams per day, and timing matters very little. Beta-alanine can help during hard efforts lasting roughly one to four minutes, but it takes several weeks of daily use. 

But your best training aid is a good program, proper recovery, a nutrient-dense diet, and good sleep. 

The Positive Corner of The Internet
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell