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Today we’re talking about something that we all have in common. You might have guessed it, it’s that thing called stress. Sometimes it’s avoidable, sometimes it’s not. One thing’s for sure…you have certainly experienced it at some point in your life. Today our knowledgeable guest, Katrina Sequenza, the founder of Healthy Free Life is here to share about how stress is affecting you. And the best part is she’s also here to share tangible tips for managing it. I’m so excited to bring this to you today.
Katrina Sequenzia is the founder of Healthy Free Life and is on a mission to help Christians ditch disease, lose weight, gain energy, and find food freedom by teaching them to create a sustainable healthy lifestyle in God’s way. As a Certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach and Registered Nurse, along with experience from her own personal health transformation journey (she was a former diseased, exhausted, sugar-addicted, yo-yo dieter), she has coached thousands of others, helping them to transform their life and health so that they can live abundantly and fulfill their God-given purpose.
I am absolutely thrilled to have Katrina on the show today because stress is something that we are absolutely all dealing with. So let’s jump on in and let’s just talk about stress. And when we say that word – stress – what type of stress are we talking about?
Types of Stress
Katrina shares that it’s so easy for us to say it is stress, mental stress, emotional stress, you know, the stressors that we experience in our relationships. And so we have this idea of what we think stress is, but what Katrina is talking about here today is really how our body is responding to the stressors in our life. And she’s not just talking about mental stressors and emotional stressors, but also physical stressors, as well. So let’s talk about both of them.
As we talk about mental and emotional stressors, think about the stressors that you have in your relationships, or the stress that you experience at work, the stress that we experience, just from the news itself. We also have a lot of stress that comes just from a change in connection and support. We saw that through the pandemic where we all lost connection and that support system, and it brought a lot of extra stress in our life. But a couple of stressors that Katrina sees that many women struggle with is the season of life stressors and also busyness. When she says seasons of life stressors, think about kids, right? So whether you have young kids or school-aged children, or maybe they’re going off to college, and that’s stressful, or maybe you are older, and you have ailing parents. And so we’re kind of being squished and sandwiched between our elderly ailing parents, while also our children who still need us. Other stressors here could be death of a loved one, moving, a job change. We all know that those are big stressors that can come up. But another big one that both Katrina and I can both attest to is the busyness and being overscheduled and overworked. Those are huge stressors that we can often find ourselves in and as Katrina mentions, she finds that sometimes we just get really overscheduled, with good things, right? So like committees and our church Bible studies and attending all of these things and these responsibilities. And while they all can be good things in our lives, they can create a level of stress.
So then we have physical stressors. It’s something that we often don’t think about. So anytime your body is under stress, whether it be through infection or injury, if you have inflammatory processes going throughout your body and you just feel like you have pain or joint pain and things like acute illness or even chronic disease is a very big stressor for your body.
We also have environmental stress, so think toxins in our lives. So whether it’s in the water we drink, or the air we breathe, the food we eat, the things that we put on our bodies; we are surrounded by toxins all over. And that creates a stress load for our body. Then there’s also the stressor of too much or too little nutrients or food, and then too much, or too little activity, especially too much. Too much exercising in the wrong way or too much dieting in the wrong way, is a huge stressor for our bodies. And Katrina is going to dive into the ramifications of all of these mental and physical stressors in a bit, but especially what dieting really does for our bodies.
I have to say personally that all very much hits close to home for me in this season of life that I’m in right now. And I love what she shared about how sometimes stress and overwhelm can actually be a result of good things, things that we actually wanted, where we’re just saying, yes, yes, yes. It’s a culmination of things that we actually really wanted but we just sometimes take too many things and too many good things even and put them on our plate. So I think that is a great point to bring up.
How Stress Affects Health
Stress is a huge toxin for our bodies, and especially the chronic daily stress. Katrina shares that if it’s acute and short stress, our bodies can adapt and handle and recover. But it’s just the chronic daily stressors that over time begins to add up and can actually impact our body in ways very similar to poor diet or lack of sleep, or a sedentary lifestyle.
We can start to experience some of these symptoms, these ailments that we might complain of…let’s see if you can relate to any of these: Hunger can be a sign of stress, cravings, overeating and binging can be from stress. Low energy, sleep issues, mood swings, depression and/or anxiety, feeling sad, feeling overwhelmed, headaches, digestive issues, joint and muscle pain are all symptoms of stress. And if we’re not careful, and we allow these symptoms to kind of sit and fester too long, it can begin to lead to disease. Stress is a very, very big driver of disease. And some diseases such as gastrointestinal disease, that makes sense, right, because where do we feel our emotions when it comes to stress? In our bellies, right, and so this can lead to things like IBS or acid reflux, we can have hormonal imbalances from stress, because many times our bodies under stress, we have hormone responses. And so we can begin to have hormonal imbalances which create all sorts of havoc on our health, but arthritis, weakened immune system, allergies, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, mental disorders, autoimmune disease, and stress can actually allow cancer cells to thrive, which is very scary. And stress can also lead to weight gain, and it also can prevent weight loss at the same time. That’s something that can be very discouraging, especially for many women.
That makes so much sense, right? It’s like all the stressors that Katrina talked about, they’re coming in all these different ways through our skin, through our mouth, even through our eyes and ears and into our mind. They’re coming in all these different ways and then it’s got to go somewhere. And Katrina really hit on a hot button topic here which is anxiety. That is one of the number one things that women are dealing with that I have found with the women that I’ve coached and worked with, and that tune into the podcast here every week. Anxiety is, I would dare to guess, possibly the number one way that stress is coming out, if not in physical diseases and whatnot, and maybe they’re tied, but anxiety is such a thing as stress is going in and then health issues and anxiety are coming out.
Stress & Weight
But let’s back up and let’s chat about how stress can specifically sabotage those weight loss efforts. And how exactly does all this stress impact our ability to lose weight? We’re right here at the beginning of a new year and everybody’s thinking and talking about weight loss and their ideal weight and what health ideally looks like for them. So let’s go there. I think this is a perfect time of the year to talk about stress and weight loss, weight gain and how those all work together.
Katrina explains that many times women will come to her and say that they are doing everything right, but the scale won’t budge. And they’re so frustrated with their results and they feel like they’re doing everything right with diet and exercise and things like that. And so Katrina just starts asking them questions about what they’re eating, how are they moving? But then she talks about other things that people don’t always consider, which is, how are you sleeping? What is your actual movement? Not exercise, but movement. But one question she always asks them to get to the root is, “Tell me about your stress”, and nine times out of ten, if someone’s not seeing the results, even though they feel like they’re doing everything right, it’s often because of that stress.
Here’s what we need to understand is that no matter how perfect we are in the other areas of our health, no matter how much you exercise, no matter how much salad you eat, stress is going to kill your results every time. And so why is this happening? What is going on? Katrina dives in by bringing us a bit of anatomy physiology here so that you can really understand what’s going on in your body, because it’s going to just help you to bring some awareness.
Stress actually creates a starvation response in your body, and it is actually a beautiful gift from God. It’s a survival response that God has given us to help keep us alive in stressful situations since creation. But the problem is, is that our brain at its base level doesn’t really have the ability to tell the difference between being confronted by a bear or the fact that you’re frustrated being stuck in traffic on your way to work. Your brain just perceives stress as stress. And so anytime your brain senses stress, it’s going to begin to elicit this chemical and hormonal response in your body. And so lots of things are happening, for instance, your heart rate will increase in times of stress.
But really, let’s talk about the hormonal response that’s preventing us from losing weight. So what’s going to happen is stress is going to increase your hunger hormones so you’re going to be hungry, you’re going to increase your cravings for food, and it’s going to also decrease your energy and your motivation, because your body is actually trying to conserve the energy because it doesn’t really know when the stress will be gone. And so your cravings and your hunger then are going to drive you to eat high caloric dense foods. So trying to get as much energy in as possible, because your brain is smart, it knows exactly what foods are going to give you the biggest hit of calories. And it wants you to eat not only high calorie, but high sugar, high fat foods. So think comfort foods, right? So you’re eating more, and you’ve lost all motivation to do something healthy, like exercise, or make a healthy dinner, and so you’re grabbing McDonald’s on the way home from work and eating in front of the TV. It ends up being all you want to do, right?
So, here’s the thing that Katrina wants everyone to know is that, let’s not be down on ourselves for feeling like this because it can feel so defeating. And we can feel so guilty when that’s what we want to do. And we think that there’s something wrong with us, we feel like maybe it’s a willpower issue, we just need to have more self-discipline. But the reality is, is that it’s not you, it is your hormones. And so you can’t overcome this temptation when you have hormones that are literally forcing you to eat and do nothing. And so obviously, if we’re in this hormonal environment, this starvation response, we’re going to overeat calories, and that’s going to lead to weight gain.
But then here’s the double-edged sword is that stress is also creating a hormonal imbalance, a hormonal environment, that actually prevents weight loss. And as Katrina explains, this is because chronic stress leads to things like insulin resistance, elevated insulin levels. And then what begins to happen is our high stress creates a release of stress hormones combined with this elevated insulin, it actually tells your body to store fat, so where you might otherwise burn it, you’re actually storing fat. And it actually prevents that fat from getting released, even if you’re exercising or trying to reduce calories. And so it’s just not a good place to be. Stress becomes this double-edged sword that leads to weight gain and prevents weight loss. And so we definitely need to identify what stress is really doing here. We need to then seek to find ways to better manage it, especially if you desire to lose weight and if you want to sustain it over time.
I was curious if Katrina thought a lot of this had to do with shifting our mindset and understanding that food is fuel. Her response was yes and no. She shares that food 100% is fuel, but it’s driving the good and the bad. So when you think about food, it’s so powerful and it has the ability to either nourish, heal, and energize and fuel our body. But also if we eat things in a not so healthy way, it can actually deplete it, increase stress hormones or lower energy, keep us addicted, causing inflammation, and eventually can lead to disease. So what we put in our mouth is absolutely, absolutely powerful. And so is it fuel? Yes, it is. But also, one of the things that Katrina really challenges her students to do is to begin to change their relationship with food which we’ll dive into more in a bit.
God’s Glorious Foods
Before we go there, there’s this burning question that every woman always wants to ask and always wants to know which is, are there a couple of foods that Katrina would recommend as superfoods, like eat this, but don’t eat that?
Katrina shares that she is a little bit less of a “eat this, don’t eat that” kind of a girl. And so when it comes to food, she believes that we need to begin to see food as God intended for us to see it. And so when we say food is fuel, it’s one of those where it’s like, yeah, but it’s also so incredibly marvelous. God has really given us just such a gift from His creation, in the form of food, and throughout Scripture, He’s taught us and has described all of these glorious foods as gifts to us. And so as we begin to see food as He sees it, and how He intended us to see it, we begin to create this new relationship with food. So “eat this, don’t eat that” is a very slippery slope for us to get into, because our brain really, really wants us to clearly define good and bad, we’d like to put things into categories. We like to say, I should eat this, and I should eat that and not eat that. but Katrina likes to begin to unravel some of those shoulds and should nots, and instead, what she does is she provides her students with a list of God’s glorious foods based upon His Word, and based upon what the latest science is saying.
So what Katrina looks at is how many of these foods are you actually eating? And are you eating 10% of foods on this list? Are you eating 50% of foods on this list? Are you eating none, are you eating a lot of them, and everyone’s going to be a different place in their journey. And what she encourages is that we begin to transition towards eating God’s glorious foods 80 to 90% of the time. She has an 80/20 rule, and that is that 80% of the time we seek to eat God’s glorious foods and 20% of the time, it leaves us room and freedom to eat foods that may not be on the list.
Katrina shares that ideally, we wouldn’t eat what she calls trigger foods. Trigger foods, meaning you have one and you can’t stop, you need the whole bag. It could be popcorn or Oreos…are they allowed in the 80/20 rule? 100% but they are something that you can get into trouble with. But having a piece of dark chocolate, for instance, is something that Katrina can eat one square of and be completely satisfied. Is dark chocolate on the glorious food listing? No, but is it something that can be enjoyed in moderation? 100%. So instead of a list of eat this, don’t eat this, she begins to break some of those rules that we’ve had for so long, especially those that have dieted. We carry these rules with us for years and decades of our life and they can keep us really bound to what God has for us when it comes to food.
There is so much wisdom in Katrina’s answer. In homeschool this year, the kids and I have been studying the story of creation and all the amazing things that God created and spoke into existence. And I think if we go clear back to the very beginning in the book of Genesis, and we read through that story of creation, that He really does clearly lay out a lot of good intentions and good plans that He had for our life and has for our life. And throughout the whole Bible the way that He asks and tells us to live, it’s not like it’s a strict rulebook, it’s really is a guide for living well and living intentionally. And it’s because He loves us so much, and truly wants the best for us.
How to Manage Stress to Fulfill our God-given Purpose
Let’s talk about some tangible ways to manage that stress so that we can fulfill that incredible good life and the God-given purpose that He has for us.
Food has Power
Staying on that food topic, let’s understand again that food is power, and it has the power to heal or to harm. And we get to make that decision. And so obviously, if we’re going to eat in a way that brings harm to our bodies, that’s going to be very stressful. Now, we’re not going to be able to decrease all of the stress. Jesus said that we will have trouble and so if food is going to potentially bring us harm, it’s going to create that stress response in our body. And what we want to do is we want to decrease overall stress in our lives, both mental, physical and emotional. And so one of the physical stressors in our body is actually how we eat. So if how we’re eating is creating a stress response, then one of the things that we can do is eat in a way that decreases the stress response, that keeps our hormones in balance, that doesn’t create an inflammatory process. And so those glorious foods, when you look at that list, most all of those foods are very nourishing foods that bring health and healing to our body and they don’t create a stress response.
Katrina mentions that what she likes to do is actually have her students start out with taking one meal a day, starting with breakfast, or whatever first meal that is for you, and the first thing she has her students do is start with a breakfast challenge. Now, she doesn’t want anybody to just eat any healthy breakfast. So somebody might look at that list and say, “Okay, I’m going to eat this off the list.” And so what she wants you to do instead is say, “I want to eat a breakfast that makes me feel amazing after I eat it, as well as all through the day.” So what’s going to happen is, if you eat a breakfast with the right combination of foods, then it’s going to actually help impact your cravings, your energy, and your hunger all throughout the day. Food has so much power.
One thing that this breakfast challenge has is that it’s an essential combination of foods, and so when you say eat this, not that, this is one of those situations where this is a way to eat that will help you reach your goals. She likes to start with baby steps, we’re going to include a protein with every breakfast and also combine it with a healthy fat and some fiber. That combination of macronutrients is really going to help your body to feel full. It literally releases hormones in your body as you eat it that tells your brain that you are full. So it’s going to give you a sense of fullness and it’s also going to give you a sense of satiation. It’s going to last longer, it’s going to help you go to lunch, for instance, and it’s going to impact your cravings later in the day. And you’re less likely to binge later in the evening, if that’s something that you struggle with. So just changing breakfast can be really huge.
Katrina also shares some great examples of breakfast for us. Some of them are going to be easier, some of them are more complicated, but think of them as little formulas and then you can make the tweaks to them because you can create your own diet, that’s okay, too. So ideally, it would be something similar to a smoothie made with some protein powder, or some plain Greek yogurt. So again, that protein powder and Greek yogurt is going to give you some high protein, and then you can put some healthy fats in there, for instance, some nuts or some seeds. And you can also pack in some fiber in the form of fruit or greens or something like that. You can also, if you enjoy yogurt, do plain Greek yogurt with some berries, seeds, with maybe a drizzle of honey or maple syrup on it.
Eggs are another great protein rich option, so two to three eggs, maybe scrambled with some baby spinach. You can add a piece of sprouted toast to it (Katrina’s favorite brand is the Ezekiel bread). Again, high protein, high fiber, it’s going to fill you up, help it last longer, and decrease those cravings later in the day. If you enjoy something like oatmeal, a bowl of oatmeal, rolled oats or steel-cut oats is a great option, maybe add some nuts or fruit to it to add in some fiber and some healthy fats in there. If you were bold, you can actually put a little bit of protein powder in there to up the protein on it. It’s not necessary but it is something that can help increase that protein.
So it doesn’t have to be complicated, just focus on one thing and that’s going to be just a really simple change that you can make to begin to energize and fuel your body in a way that’s going to really support it.
I feel like that is such a hot tip. And I can tell that as Katrina works with her clients, that their lives are being transformed, I can absolutely tell that just by talking to her and I can hear her heart and her passion for what she does. So some key words that I heard were protein, healthy fats, and fiber.
Movement – Not Exercise
So the next habit that Katrina shares is the habit of movement. Now, movement is so vitally important in helping us to combat stress and lose weight. But here’s the thing, when she says movement, she’s not talking about exercise. Exercise is important, but exercise is definitely not what’s going to move the needle with weight loss. She shares that the latest science is actually showing that exercise does not aid in weight loss, and in fact, exercise done the wrong way, too intense and too long, is going to actually increase our cravings, our hunger, and decrease our energy which is going to lead to potential weight gain. And so that can really get us into trouble. So exercise is actually a stressor, whereas movement is actually going to help us to lower stress and encourage weight loss.
So movement is really anything that is not structured exercise. So think walking, getting your steps in, cleaning. Next time you make your bed, think about all of that movement you’re getting…bending, lifting, fidgeting, all of these things we do with our body throughout the day is movement, and that is having a huge impact on our hormones. And if we can impact our hormones, that means we’re impacting our metabolism. And so, movement is really the only activity that can simultaneously lower our stress hormone, cortisol, and also regulate our blood sugar. And that means that movement is actually going to be able to help your body reduce stress, help us conquer cravings, help us lose weight, and it’s going to prevent us from gaining weight. And then, we’re going to also prevent disease. So it’s really a win-win.
So let’s talk about how much movement and Katrina talks about this in two ways; She likes to share, ideally, what is the perfect ideal goal of the habit, but then also the realisms of where we are and how to begin to make baby steps towards that goal. So ideally, we are taking 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day. And we’re also doing other nourishing movement throughout our day; we’re bending, we’re squatting, we’re doing laundry, we’re cleaning, we’re taking out the trash, all of these things that move our body in a loving way. But for some of us, getting 7,000 steps a day, it’s just not easy. For Katrina, she’s an online health coach serving people all around the world, but she sits all day in front of her computer. And if she doesn’t intentionally walk, she will only average about 2,500 steps. So if you also have a sedentary job or life, same thing, you’re really not going to average a lot of steps, and that’s really not good for our bodies. If we don’t move it, we will lose it. But she doesn’t recommend jumping to 7,000+ steps right away, that can lead to injury. And so again, baby steps for the win. Katrina encourages you to start with a five minute walk around your house, because five minutes is about an average of 500 steps. Just by doing five minutes, you have increased your steps. A 10 minute walk is 1,000 steps. And so that’s super powerful. So we don’t have to go outside, but the key is butting our habits up with other things we’re already doing so that we can make that habit stick. So maybe right after your Bible reading time, or your breakfast or your lunch, just set a timer and walk for five minutes, and it makes it super easy. That’s going to be a huge mover in your metabolism, it’s going to be a huge stress reducer, because it’s going to lower those stress hormones, and it’s going to make you feel so much better.
I find what Katrina shared there both encouraging and free to hear that we don’t necessarily have to go hit the gym or hit the treadmill and just go crazy with it until we’re you know, just sweating and exhausted, but rather to look at it this way in moving our body.
Rest, Rest, Rest!
Finally, Katrina shares one more habit with us that many are missing from their lives, and that is the habit of rest. Rest is so vitally important, and it’s a missing ingredient, depending on our age. If you are in perimenopause, menopause, post-menopause, if you’re not there yet, it’s coming. It is one of those that we begin to lose our ability to manage stress as well. So not only are we experiencing all of this stress as we begin to transition hormonally, which can start as early as our 30s, but especially in our 40s and 50s, we begin to lose our ability to manage our stress as well because we’re losing key hormones. We’re losing progesterone, and we’re losing estrogen, which really act as stress shields for us when we’re younger, and we begin to lose that, and so we are more stress-sensitive. So as we age, we’re going to need to embrace the lifestyle of rest. God commanded us to rest. He commanded us not only through taking a Sabbath rest, but Jesus commands us to come to Him for rest. There are accounts of Him just taking his disciples or Him going off by Himself to rest and to pray and to recover after even doing a miracle. And so we need to understand how important that is. And we need to invite rest into our life.
Katrina encourages her students and us to begin to add rest based activities. This could be just being still for 5-10 minutes in the afternoon which can do huge, huge things for our reduction of stress. It can also include reading a book, observing the Sabbath, taking a hot bath, having a cup of tea, whether it’s by yourself or with a loved one, or with a friend. Even sitting there and petting your pets is a huge stress reliever science has shown. And so we just need to create these experiences where we just can take a breath, where we just can release the stress. And that’s what rest based activities are going to do.
One small step that we can begin to do is just schedule out some rest periods in our day. So ideally, here’s what Katrina’s goal is for her students is that they’re resting a total of 90 minutes every day. And that they’re also taking a weekly Sabbath. And if you’re like me, and you have responsibilities of parenting, and work and other responsibilities in church, and life is just busy, it can seem impossible. So we’ve just got to start where we are. And maybe that’s just a 5-10 minute break. And again, butting up against a habit that you’re already doing, like lunch, would be great. Katrina really recommends the middle of the day, only because it is something that can help us with our energy and our hunger, cravings and all sorts of things in the afternoon because we begin to lose our willpower and our energy as the night and day goes on.
I feel that everything Katrina shared so deeply, everything from perimenopause, and menopause. I’m 37 and I am in perimenopause right now. And I am feeling and experiencing many of the things that she shared there, just to being a busy wife and mom with the kids and all the things and sometimes going seven days a week. And remembering though, that the Lord created rest, and He created time for rest. I love it. We just have this tendency to just fill up our lives with busy and with noise and I just want to encourage everybody to just start small, like Katrina shared, take five minutes, and even just try sitting in silence.
Take a Breath
Katrina did a great breathing exercise with us on the podcast that she teaches her students and it’s called the 4-4-8 breathing technique. So when we breathe slowly, it has the ability to take our bodies and our minds from a state of fight or flight to a state of rest and digest. It actually changes our nervous system. So we have two nervous systems, we have a sympathetic and parasympathetic. And sympathetic is our stress response nervous system and it actually helps our body shift to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is going to tell our bodies that everything’s okay, and that we can rest. So we’re going be able to mitigate stress, just by breathing. This is something that we can do in traffic, we can do at a meeting, we can just use it anywhere. In fact, many of Katrina’s students use it before bed to try to help with sleeping or if they wake up in the middle of night.
So all it is, is to breathe in through your nose for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, and then breathe out through your mouth for eight seconds, through pursed lips, ideally. So what that’s going to do is it’s going to really slow down our breathing. And then ideally, we would repeat that a few times, maybe up to five, up to ten even and just notice the difference that you’re going to experience in your body. It’s one of those tools that you can use anywhere. And I know it’s going to be a tool that’s going to be very powerful in your life.
When to Seek Professional Help
Before I closed out my conversation with Katrina, I had one more question and that was when should someone seek professional help in all of this?
She shares that when it comes to stress, we need to recognize that not all stress is avoidable. We’re going to have life stressors, but we also have learned to respond to stress from those in our lives. So our parents, for instance, we kind of learned how to respond to stress, some of us are more wired for a different stress response than others, some can respond very differently to stress. And so sometimes we may actually need to seek the counsel of a professional counselor, for instance, to help us walk through rewiring our brain to help us respond to stress differently. So if you respond to stress, and it seems to elevate in you all of the time, no matter the situation, then seeking a qualified licensed counselor might be a really great thing to consider.
But then in addition to that, or if you don’t have necessarily a severe stress response, and you want to just release the overall stress response in your in your life and decrease your overall stress load, if you will, that’s where just creating a diet and lifestyle that can serve you to minimize the stressors that you can control so that the stressors that you can’t control, you can better manage. And that’s where working with somebody like a life coach can help you to create that lifestyle. Working with someone like Katrina, a health coach, who can help you to create that lifestyle as well, are great resources for you. And so definitely reach out to either one of us if that’s something that you’re looking looking for in your life to reduce the overall stress and help you to create that joy-filled life.
It’s been such a joy to learn from Katrina and I know that she has some great resources available for our listeners so be sure to check those out below and in the podcast show notes for this episode! And what perfect timing. Here we are in the new year, it’s a great time to get healthy and to do it the way that God calls us to do it.
Connect with Katrina!
- Hang out on Instagram and Facebook
- Listen to the Healthy Free Life Show podcast
- Learn more on her website
