Losing Weight: Things You Should Know About Stress
Losing Weight: Things You Should Know About Stress
If you haven't then it's about time to completely understand and know why stress makes you fat and how this will affect your plans of losing weight.
Generally, stress makes your body release the kind of hormones that make you crave for food, and we all know how that ends.
But how does stress affect our body weight? There are more ways than one, actually. For one thing, stress causes our body to store more fats than usual. Also, as mentioned before, stress makes us want to eat more, which is because more of a hormone called cortisol is released when we're stressed. This hormone is what increases our food cravings.
Stress also has a direct effect on how our stomach feels. People often feel uneasy with their stomach, which people tend to mistake for typical hunger. As a result, they decide to eat when they're not supposed to.
Stress also decreases the amount of magnesium in our body. Magnesium is needed for metabolism and most bodily functions. As we stress, the cortisol secretion is heightened, which wastes the magnesium more. Lesser magnesium means lesser weight control for our body.
And in most cases, people who get stressed often find comfort in food (unless they have other ways to de-stress). Thus, people who don't have more active pastimes tend to gain more weight when stressed.
And then there's such a thing as acute and chronic stress. This is the kind of stress that lets your body respond to sudden situations where you need extra energy. Adrenalin goes through circulation and gets pumped into our blood, which goes into our arms and legs to increase movement. Out body becomes more alert, with eyes dilated and blood pressure going up. Our blood also becomes thicker in order to induce faster clotting.
As a result of this rush, our digestive system momentarily ceases (after all, dinner is the last thing you think of when you're in danger). So does most of our bodily systems that won't seem important as of the moment.
But while we don't see life-threatening situations today, what we do get are chronic stresses as a response to unemployment, mortgages, bills, etc. And this results pretty much in the same way as acute stress, only that it tend to linger more since the problems are long term. Thus, chronic stress effectively takes down our immune system and makes us prone to illnesses more - that includes weight gain and diabetes.
But how do we deal with this? By simply knowing the direct connection between stress and weight gain, we already become more aware of what we're doing. At least this time around you won't be subconsciously fattening yourself up next time you feel that you're down in the dumps. Maybe next time you feel depressed, you'll find better things to do than eat.
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http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/losing-weight-things-you-should-know-about-stress-3923121.html
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