Chronic inflammation might be the hidden barrier standing between someone and their weight loss goals.
Former Army Ranger and strength coach Judd Linhardt recently broke down exactly how this works, and why the conventional “eat less, move more” advice often fails.
His explanation cuts through the noise of trendy anti-inflammatory diets and gets to the science of what’s actually happening in an inflamed body.
And the answer isn’t what most fitness influencers are selling.
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Why Inflammation Isn’t the Enemy (Usually)
Before diving into the problem, Linhardt makes a crucial distinction that often gets lost in wellness circles.
Inflammation itself is essential for survival. It’s how bodies heal from injuries, fight off infections, and adapt to training stress.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
Inflammation is not a bad thing. It’s a great thing. It’s actually a miraculous thing. It keeps us alive. It heals us.
This healing process is so critical that interfering with it can actually slow down recovery. Linhardt points out that the doctor who coined the term “RICE” (rest, ice, compression, elevation) later recanted his recommendation about icing injuries.
The reason? Icing directly interferes with crucial stages of healing through inflammation.
The real problem emerges when inflammation becomes chronic rather than acute.
The Stress Connection: How Everything Adds Up
Linhardt traces the science back to Hans Selye’s work in the 1930s, when the researcher noticed patients with completely different ailments shared remarkably similar symptoms.
Fatigue, brain fog, poor wound healing, mental disturbances—all pointed to a common underlying mechanism.
This led to the discovery of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the understanding that stress is cumulative, regardless of its source.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
It’s all cumulative. So like the emotional stress, the psychological stress, the cognitive stress, the physical stress, the organ stress, it all adds up cumulatively to affect our ability to recover.
A tough day at work affects quadriceps recovery just as much as an extra set of squats. Relationship problems compound training stress.
The body can’t effectively differentiate between these stressors—it only knows tissues aren’t recovering.
The Major Inflammation Triggers
Linhardt identifies several key contributors to chronic inflammation that people can actually control:
Diet: It’s Not What You Think
The carnivore crowd loves to vilify plants and their anti-nutrients, but Linhardt calls this out as misguided.
For most people without specific sensitivities, the amount of anti-nutrients required to cause harm far exceeds normal consumption. Meanwhile, the benefits from antioxidants and phytochemicals dramatically outweigh any negatives.
Really, it’s not the foods that we’re eating so much that’s really causing this. It’s the overeating of food and then it’s the not eating of certain foods.
Processed foods create problems not because of mysterious toxins, but because they pack massive calories without essential micronutrients. This forces overconsumption just to meet nutritional needs, which itself becomes a stressor.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
Toxins We Choose
Alcohol stands out as the most problematic, with research increasingly showing no safe level of consumption for long-term health.
While healthy systems can tolerate occasional drinks, already-inflamed bodies struggle significantly with even moderate alcohol intake.
Sleep Deprivation
Sleep represents the ultimate parasympathetic state where recovery happens. Without adequate quality sleep, the body attempts recovery during waking hours.
Its primary mechanism? Inflammation.
The Cortisol Cascade: Where Fat Loss Breaks Down
Here’s where Linhardt’s explanation gets fascinating. Chronic inflammation triggers constant cortisol release, and cortisol—like inflammation itself—isn’t inherently bad.
It’s actually performance-enhancing in the right context, increasing alertness, pain tolerance, mental acuity, and energy availability.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
But chronically elevated cortisol creates a catastrophic cascade:
- Muscle breakdown: The body views muscle as expensive, metabolically demanding tissue worth sacrificing during chronic stress
- Elevated blood sugar: Constant glucose release requires constant insulin to manage it
- Insulin resistance: Chronic insulin release leads to cellular insensitivity, requiring ever-higher levels
- Cellular starvation: Despite high blood sugar, glucose can’t enter cells effectively
The Hunger Hormone Disaster
When cells feel starved despite adequate food intake, the body releases ghrelin—the hunger hormone.
This makes complete biological sense during actual illness or injury, but becomes counterproductive during chronic inflammation.
When we become hungry at a cellular level, our bodies release something called ghrelin. Ghrelin is our hunger signal. It makes us hungry.
To counter ghrelin, the body releases leptin—the satiety hormone. But just like with insulin, chronic release creates leptin resistance.
The result? Constant hunger that doesn’t respond to normal fullness signals.
Why Bodies Default to Fat Storage
Linhardt demolishes the romanticized image of shredded cavemen.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
We didn’t really evolve to have a ton of muscle and be very lean. Like we picture cavemen being these bodybuilder looking dudes that were shredded. That’s not how we evolved.
From an evolutionary perspective, muscle represents a luxury tissue—heavy, metabolically expensive, and creating significant waste products. Bodies maintain it when conditions support hard physical work.
Fat, conversely, serves as biological insurance: less dense, insulating, joint-protective, and calorie-rich for survival during hardship.
When chronic inflammation signals that something is wrong, the body responds exactly as evolution programmed it: dump the expensive muscle, store protective fat.
Why “Eat Less, Move More” Fails
This explains why thermodynamics-based advice often backfires for inflamed individuals.
Eating less when already nutrient-deficient and hormonally driven to overconsume creates an impossible battle against biology. Adding intense exercise stacks another stressor onto an already overwhelmed system.
If you are already inflamed, you already feel like shit, going out and doing 10 sprints isn’t going to help you.
The strategies that worked in someone’s twenties stop functioning as age-related inflammation increases. Young bodies tolerate poor sleep, garbage food, and alcohol while still responding to simple calorie restriction.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
Older, inflamed systems cannot.
The Real Solution: Fix the System First
Linhardt’s prescription focuses on reducing inflammatory load before aggressive fat loss attempts:
Address Lifestyle Stressors
- Minimize alcohol: Even moderate intake compounds inflammation in already-stressed systems
- Prioritize sleep quality: Non-negotiable for parasympathetic recovery
- Practice stress management: Breathing work, relaxation techniques, and mindfulness aren’t “woo-woo”—they’re physiologically essential
Upgrade Nutrition Quality
Rather than obsessing over calories, focus on nutrient density. Colorful vegetables, berries, nuts, seeds, healthy fats, and adequate protein support the body’s anti-inflammatory mechanisms.
Eliminate processed foods not because they contain scary chemicals, but because they force caloric overconsumption to meet nutritional needs.
Rethink Exercise Intensity
High-intensity training benefits those who are already healthy. For inflamed individuals, low-intensity movement provides enough stimulus to activate healing without adding crushing stress.
Daily walks, gentle movement, outdoor exposure—these create positive adaptations that prepare the system for more demanding work later.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
So the first answer is to fix your shit. If you want to lose weight, fix your shit.
The Takeaway
Chronic inflammation creates a perfect storm of hormonal dysfunction that makes fat loss nearly impossible through willpower alone.
Elevated cortisol breaks down muscle while promoting fat storage. Insulin resistance starves cells while flooding the bloodstream with glucose. Ghrelin creates relentless hunger while leptin resistance prevents satisfaction.
Fighting this with simple calorie restriction and intense exercise adds fuel to an already raging fire.
The solution requires addressing root causes: sleep, stress management, toxin reduction, nutrition quality, and appropriate exercise intensity for current health status.
Fix the inflammation, and the fat loss follows naturally. Skip this step, and even the most aggressive diet and training program fights an uphill battle against basic biology.
