subject: Stressed Out - Well Then...forget Weight Loss [print this page] In my studies of tapping out emotional connections to food and helping people lose weight, I have recently run across some new information that has helped me more than anything else at losing the weight and getting off my plateaus. The epiphany was this: There is a direct correlation between weight loss and your stress level! I actually always knew this in a way, but really did not understand the full impact of stress on our bodies until I started to research it.
The dictionary definition of stress is any real or imagined threat, and your bodys response to it. This can be a good thing, as well as a
negative thing. Stress is not entirely negative. Some stress can be avoided and other stress cannot, and some stress can even be beneficial, but it becomes a problem when the stress starts impacting your body in a bad way.
When you have an understanding of psychological acupressure, you know that emotions
impact the body in every way possible. Emotions can actually create physiological changes. These changes include your skin, heart rate, digestion, joints, muscles, hair, systems, organs, and even your brain.
Stress is one of these emotions that can cause harmful side effects and when we eat in a state of stress or anxiety, which is pretty much all the time for most people,
there are particularly bad side effects. The best way to explain this is to outline what happens when you are stressed. Our bodies are made to react to a stress
emotion by getting ready to flee or to fight. Its called the fight or flight response. It increases your blood pressure, heart rate, and increases the blood into your arms and legs in order to get ready to flee. With regards to weight loss, however, this response is not helpful because it shunts blood away from your midsection and virtually shuts down your digestive system.
When you eat under stress, even if you are eating the healthiest food in the world, you will not be able to fully digest and absorb the food and nutrients from that food and your body will not be able to burn calories effectively. Since all that blood and oxygen are being used elsewhere, your metabolism also suffers, plus you will see a decrease in the enzymes in your stomach. Your
cholesterol and triglycerides then go up because of the decreasing stomach flora, which then leads you to be more sensitive to food, which then, in turn, creates allergies, gastroesophageal reflux, and heartburn.
If that isnt bad enough, the most important factor, when your body creates this stress response, is that your cortisol and insulin levels rise. These are two very important hormones! When your cortisol is consistently elevated, as it is when we are in a state of low-level stress response, you have difficulty losing weight or building muscle. Cortisol is also responsible for gaining weight around your
midsection. This is the type of fat that builds up around your internal organs known as visceral fat. Visceral fat is a major contributing factor to developing diabetes and having metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a particularly negative thing with regards to weight loss. It is closely associated with insulin resistance where the body cannot use insulin effectively. This syndrome also leads to high cholesterol, which can then lead to all sorts of heart problems, raised blood pressure,
central obesity, and a proinflammatory state. It definitely is not up there on your list of diseases you want to have.
by: Barkley Smith
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