How stress causes weight gain

By Weight Loss Consultant • Related • Filed Under

Every day, your life is filled with stress. From getting the kids to school, to dealing with your boss, to figuring out what’s for dinner, you face stress on an almost constant basis. It’s important to start thinking about how to reduce that stress in order to improve your quality of life, better your mental health, and stop gaining weight. Did you catch that? Reducing your stress helps you stop gaining weight.

If you want to know how stress causes weight gain, you have to understand how your hormones work. Your body has certain glands that secrete hormones that help your body react to stimulus, stay in balance and cope with stress. Your adrenal gland releases a hormone called adrenaline. When you are under stress, your adrenal gland goes crazy to give you extra adrenaline and cortisol that can help you deal with a stressful situation.

Adrenaline is the cause behind the “fight or flight” response. Adrenaline and cortisol give your body the added energy it needs to fight a horrible foe or to run away from a bad situation. You may wonder how that is helpful when you are stressed out about traffic. Since you can’t beat traffic up or run away from it (if you could, there’d be no reason for stress) the adrenaline your adrenal gland releases in answer to your stress seems worthless. But it’s actually the key to understanding how stress causes weight gain.

Chronic stress causes chronic adrenaline and cortisol. This forces your body to use a bunch of energy from your lean muscle tissue in order to keep your energy up. But, using energy is like burning calories, so that’s good right? Wrong. Lean muscle is not the area you want to lose energy and burn calories from. You want to burn it from your stored fat cells, but adrenaline and cortisol prevent this because they want you to have stored fat to deal with any emergencies that come about. In addition to preventing you from burning the spare tire, the production of these hormones actually makes you hungry. This results in you eating more and…guess what? Gaining more weight.

There are other complications, like working your adrenal gland so hard for so long that it can no longer produce the adrenaline you need on a daily basis. This can lead to weight gain, sleep loss, energy loss and more. If you suspect this has happened to you, it is important that you see your primary care physician immediately. This is a serious condition that should receive immediate medical attention.

So, how do you stop this vicious cycle? The firs thing you should do is consult your physician. He or she will give you some guidance on setting up a healthy eating and exercise plan to help you combat stress and weight gain. In addition, take some time to understand the cause of your stress and to decide if there isn’t something you can do to reduce it. If cooking dinner is too much after work, find some easy to cook frozen dinners or already prepared meals to serve your family. If work has you all atwitter, find out if you can reduce your hours or your workload to reduce the pressure on you. If driving the kids around to school, soccer practice and dance class causes you too much stress, see if you can switch off with your spouse or the parent of another child in the class.

Remember, your health is one of the most important assets you offer your family. Don’t let it erode simply because you have a pile of papers on your desk at work.

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