By Melissa Eich | Episode 177 of the Body-Led Business Podcast
If you have spent any time on wellness social media, you have probably been told that your cortisol is high, that is why you cannot lose weight, and here is a supplement to fix it.
I want you to hear me on this: that is not how cortisol works. And that oversimplification is keeping a lot of women stuck in a cycle of trying things that do not work — because they are solving for the wrong picture.
Cortisol is one of the most misunderstood hormones in the wellness space. It is also one of the most important things I look at when working with women in midlife who are struggling with weight gain, muscle loss, poor sleep, and exhaustion that does not make sense given how well they are taking care of themselves.
In this post — pulled directly from Episode 177 of the podcast — I am going to break down what cortisol actually is, the three cortisol patterns I see most often on DUTCH tests, and why guessing your cortisol picture is costing you years of trying everything and never feeling better.
What Social Media Gets Wrong About Cortisol
Here is something I want you to understand about wellness content online: if something feels extreme, polarizing, and very black and white, that is often a marketing technique. The human brain loves clarity. It loves yes and no answers. And when someone gives you a very simple explanation with a very simple solution — your cortisol is high, take this supplement — it feels like relief.
But simple does not always mean accurate. And when it comes to cortisol, it is almost never accurate.
The “cortisol face” myth. You may have seen before and after photos online attributing a rounder, puffier face to high cortisol. This is not real. The presentation described as “cortisol face” on social media is associated with a true adrenal crisis — a medical condition called Cushing’s syndrome. If you are listening to a health podcast or reading a wellness blog, that is not you. What you are often seeing in those before and after photos is the completely normal fuller face of someone in their early 20s compared to their face in their 30s or 40s. That is not cortisol. That is just your face being a face.
The high cortisol = weight gain equation. Yes, cortisol can contribute to weight gain. But cortisol can also be low, or produced at the wrong times of day, or produced in high amounts that your body immediately deactivates so you cannot use it. Each of these pictures looks different, feels different, and requires a completely different approach. Treating a low cortisol picture the same way you treat a high cortisol picture will make you feel significantly worse.
This is why the DUTCH test exists. And this is why I use it with every client inside the Complete Hormone Package.
What Cortisol Actually Is — And Why We Need It
Cortisol is your primary stress hormone, produced by your adrenal glands. Think of your adrenal glands as an incredibly intelligent alarm system that sits on top of your kidneys, reading your environment every single day.
Your adrenal glands are monitoring:
- How you are thinking and feeling about your stress
- How you are managing and recovering from stress
- Whether you are eating enough food throughout the day
- Whether your blood sugar is stable
- How hard you are working out and whether you are recovering from it
Your cortisol is responding to all of that — constantly, in real time. It is in communication with your nervous system, your hormones, and your metabolism every single day.
And here is the thing I really want you to understand: we want cortisol. Cortisol is not your enemy. We want enough cortisol, produced at the right times, that our body can actually use.
When that is happening, you feel energized in the morning. You can focus. Your body can build and maintain muscle. Your metabolism is working — meaning your body is taking food and using it as energy rather than storing it as body fat. You feel like yourself.
When cortisol is off — and it can be off in a lot of different directions — everything starts to feel wrong and confusing.
This is where the DUTCH test becomes so valuable. Because the DUTCH test does not just give you a number. It shows you what you are producing, what your body is actually using, and at what times of day that production is happening. That is information a standard blood draw simply cannot give you.
The Three Cortisol Patterns I See Most Often on DUTCH Tests
Pattern 1: High Cortisol Your Body Is Deactivating
This is the one that surprises people most.
A client comes to me exhausted — bone tired, struggling to get through the day, barely able to get workouts in. You would assume that if cortisol is high, she should feel wired. But when we get her DUTCH test back, her cortisol production is very elevated.
Here is what is actually happening. When your body recognizes that you are producing too much cortisol and that your system cannot handle more stimulation, it takes that cortisol and converts it into something called cortisone — an inactive, unusable form of cortisol. So your body is producing a large amount of cortisol, immediately deactivating it so you cannot use it, and simultaneously sending you the signal to feel exhausted — because it is trying to get you to stop.
Your body is protecting you from yourself.
Now, if this woman went to get a standard blood draw for cortisol, her levels would come back elevated. Her doctor might confirm: yes, your cortisol is high. But what that blood draw cannot show is that her body is taking all of that cortisol away from her. She is not getting energy from it. The number looks high but the experience is full exhaustion.
This is why the DUTCH test tells a story that serum testing simply cannot.
Pattern 2: Low Cortisol — The Late Stage Adrenal Burnout Picture
This is the picture I know very personally, because it showed up on my own DUTCH test.
When I ran my test, my cortisol production was very low. And what my body was doing with what little it was creating was moving it into cortisone as well — hoarding it, not letting me use it. My adrenal glands had essentially said: we have been running at full speed for too long. We are shutting down the production line.
This is what we refer to as late stage adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout. Your body has been under chronic stress — emotional stress, physical stress from under-eating, the accumulated stress of pushing yourself past your capacity for too long — and at some point it simply stops trying to produce more. It slows the entire system down to conserve what is left.
What this feels like from the inside:
- Low motivation
- Difficulty getting out of bed even after a full night of sleep
- Feeling flat or emotionally muted
- Mild depression or low mood
- No drive
- Anxiety that lives in your mind — racing, spinning thoughts — while your body feels completely flat and heavy
Here is the sneaky part: on a blood draw, this woman’s cortisol could actually show up as high. Because her adrenal glands are producing very little, her body recognizes the scarcity and starts hoarding what is available. The amount floating in her bloodstream looks elevated even though the production is critically low and none of it is being used.
You cannot guess this picture. You cannot assume it based on symptoms. And you absolutely cannot address it correctly based on a blood draw alone.
Pattern 3: Wrong Timing — Cortisol Spikes at 2am
This pattern explains something that an enormous number of women experience without ever having a name for it.
You fall asleep fine. You get four, five, maybe six hours in. And then right around 2 or 3 in the morning, you are wide awake. No particular reason. You lie there for an hour. You eventually fall back asleep but wake up feeling like you barely slept at all.
Here is what is happening. Blood sugar instability from the day before does not stop being unstable just because you fell asleep. Your body is still managing it at night. When your blood sugar starts to drop in the middle of the night — which it will if you have not eaten balanced, consistent meals throughout the day — your body perceives that as an emergency.
It produces cortisol to go out and find glucose sources, to stabilize your blood sugar so your brain has what it needs to function. That cortisol spike is what wakes you up. Cortisol is now floating in your bloodstream, keeping you alert until your body uses what it needs and you can finally drift back to sleep — or you simply stay awake until morning.
On the DUTCH test, we can see exactly where in the day and night your cortisol is spiking and dropping. We can see if you have elevated cortisol at 2am when it should be at its lowest. And that information changes everything about how we support you — because the solution is not a cortisol supplement. It is addressing your blood sugar stability during the day so your body can actually rest at night.
The Cortisol and Muscle Connection Nobody Is Talking About
This is one of the most important things I want midlife women to understand, and it is almost never discussed in the context of cortisol.
Cortisol and muscle have a direct, bidirectional relationship. And if you are working out consistently in midlife and not seeing results — not building muscle, not seeing your body composition shift — this is very likely part of the picture.
When Cortisol Is Chronically High
When cortisol is too high for too long, it becomes catabolic — meaning it breaks things down. And muscle is one of the first things it targets.
Here is why. Your body does not actually need extra muscle to survive. Muscle is metabolically expensive to build and maintain. It requires ongoing energy. But body fat? Body fat is your body’s number one safety net. It is stored energy. So when your nervous system is in stress mode and cortisol is chronically elevated, your body will break down your muscle and convert and store energy as body fat — because that is what it understands as protection.
Body fat is your body’s version of safety. Muscle is a luxury it cannot afford when it is under threat.
This is why women in high stress states — even when they are eating well and working out consistently — start to lose muscle and gain body fat at the same time. Ten or twenty years ago your body built and kept muscle easily. Now you are doing the same things and the opposite is happening. That is not a willpower problem or an aging problem. That is a biology problem. And it starts with cortisol.
When Cortisol Is Too Low
On the other end of the spectrum, when cortisol is very low, your body is in full conservation mode. It does not have the perceived energy available to invest in building and maintaining muscle.
This is what that looks like in the gym:
- Weights that should feel manageable feel incredibly heavy
- Progressive overload — continuing to increase weights, sets, and reps — feels impossible
- You do the same workout over and over without progressing
- You are constantly deloading, unable to match what you lifted last week or even last month
- Your workouts wipe you out rather than energizing you
This is your adrenal system communicating that it does not have the resources available to build right now. And the answer is not a different workout program. It is not pushing harder. It is understanding what your cortisol is actually doing and building your body back up from the right foundation.
The way I support women through this is always going to come back to two things: nervous system and nutrition. We make sure the body feels safe during workouts. We fuel strategically before and around training. We design workouts so we are not breaking down the same muscle groups repeatedly without recovery. And we work on progressive overload in a way that signals to the body that building muscle is the priority — once the foundation is actually in place to support it.
When cortisol stabilizes, the body starts investing in muscle again. Workouts feel like they are working. Metabolism — which is directly tied to how much muscle you carry — comes back online.
Why You Cannot Out-Supplement Your Cortisol Picture
I know what you want. You want something simple and quick that you can take so you can feel better and move on with your life. I completely understand that. You are busy. There is a lot asking for your energy.
But here is the truth: you cannot out-supplement your cortisol picture.
Any supplement designed to lower cortisol may help your body process cortisol differently, but it is not correcting the reason your cortisol is dysregulated in the first place. That reason is always going to be your nervous system. It is always going to be how safe your body feels day to day — how you are feeding yourself, how you are moving, how you are recovering, how much chronic stress has been living in your body over time.
A supplement is not a nervous system reset.
And without knowing your actual cortisol picture — what you are producing, what you are using, and when — you are guessing. Even if your symptoms sound like high cortisol, I have been surprised more often than not. Someone describes exhaustion and brain fog and I think high cortisol — and then the DUTCH test comes back showing she is critically low, and her body is hoarding what little she has. If she had taken a supplement to lower her cortisol based on her symptoms alone, she would have felt significantly worse.
Guessing is why so many women spend years doing all the right things and never feeling better.
A Real Client Story
I want to share a client story because I think it is going to land for a lot of you.
She came to me overwhelmed. High stress. She has ADHD and was really struggling — scattered thoughts all day, difficulty focusing even with medication, that anxious fight-or-flight feeling running constantly in the background. She felt like she was holding on by a thread.
When we ran her DUTCH test, her cortisol was very elevated. And when I looked at her nutrition picture, the answer was immediately clear. She was not eating enough. Not because she was intentionally restricting — her ADHD medication was suppressing her hunger and fullness cues, very similar to how a GLP-1 works. Her body was telling her it was not hungry, so she was not eating. She thought she was listening to her body.
But here is what was actually happening: she was not eating, so her blood sugar was crashing throughout the day. Her body was producing emergency cortisol to compensate for those blood sugar crashes. Her nervous system was in constant alarm mode. And that alarm mode was making her ADHD symptoms exponentially worse — which made it harder to focus, harder to organize herself, harder to remember to eat. A completely vicious cycle.
The first thing we did was almost embarrassingly simple. We added a smoothie in the morning. Something easy, something that got consistent nourishment into her body within the first hour of waking up. And then we slowly added regular meals throughout the day — not perfect, just consistent.
She has since stopped her ADHD medication. That was her choice entirely, not something I directed. But by simply feeding her body consistently, the anxiety running in the background has quieted dramatically. The scattered, unfocused, chaotic feelings have decreased significantly. Her cortisol is no longer spiking to compensate for the blood sugar emergencies she was unknowingly creating every single day.
Her body was not broken. It was desperately, intelligently trying to get her attention. And what was showing up as severe ADHD and constant anxiety was her body saying: I am starving. Please feed me.
We cannot underestimate how smart the body is.
What To Do Next
If you recognized yourself anywhere in this post — if you have been working out consistently without seeing muscle, if you are waking up at 2 or 3am, if you are exhausted in a way that does not match your life, if your labs keep coming back normal but you still feel awful — this is not in your head.
Your cortisol picture is real, measurable, and testable. And when we know what your picture actually is, we can build a protocol specifically designed around your results.
That is exactly what the Complete Hormone Package is built to do.
What’s included:
- Your full DUTCH test — complete hormone picture, adrenal and cortisol picture, estrogen detox pathways, nutritional organic acids
- A personalized 12-week protocol built from your actual results: strategic nutrition, workouts designed around building muscle, nervous system work specific to your cortisol picture, and targeted supplementation
- Three follow-up visits with me — online or in person in South Dakota
If you want to talk through whether this is the right fit first, book a free consultation. I will review your full health history — especially your hormonal history — and give you an honest answer on whether this is right for you. If it is not, I will tell you that too.
[Click here to BOOK YOUR CONSULTATION]
Already know this is for you? Head straight to checkout from the link above, or DM me the word DUTCH on Instagram @melissa_eich and I will send you everything directly.
Questions? Email me at melissa@melissaeichwellness.com. I read every one.
Listen to Episode 177 in full:
Missed last week? Episode 176 covers perimenopause, weight gain, and detoxing your hormones — the foundation for everything we covered here: [EPISODE LINK]
About Melissa Eich Melissa is a nervous system, hormone, and somatic coach helping midlife women understand what is actually happening inside their bodies so they can stop guessing and start feeling like themselves again. She works with clients online and in person in South Dakota.
🌐 melissaeichwellness.com 📱 @melissa_eich 💌 melissa@melissaeichwellness.com
