How Stress Causes Weight Gain

Have you been working out hard enough and taking a healthy nutritious diet but still nothing seems to work and you are still far away from your goal? Apart from a healthy diet, exercise, and sleep, stress could be the factor that is pushing you back.

It has been known for long that stress could be an important factor behind weight gain. While most people are under the impression that stress and tension lead to loss of appetite, it’s the other way round in the long run.

You must have seen in numerous movies that people are gorging on tubs of ice-creams after a breakup or rejection. Ever wondered why all the comfort foods are either junk or desserts? And why are they even called comfort foods?

Your body and your hormones react in a particular way when you are stressed. The stress could be real or imagined, it could be a presentation or you running away from a snake. Your body won’t understand the difference that encountering a snake doesn’t happen often and a presentation will happen regularly. It just knows that you are stressed and it will respond in the same way for both situations.

How The Body Reacts To Stress

Our body is designed to handle stress and danger in a particular way, which is popularly called as the fight or flight mode. The term fight or flight means when you encounter a stressed condition you have to either stay and deal with it or you can just run away from the situation. This mode helps you make a quick decision when you are in danger.

After entering this mode a number of hormonal changes take place inside our body. Due to the high-stress level, our sympathetic nervous system is activated. The sympathetic nervous systems trigger adrenal glands which release adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol.

The result- increased heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate. It takes 20 to 60 minutes for the body to return to a normal state after the threat is gone.

Once you come back to a normal state, cortisol still hangs around. Cortisol makes you crave unhealthy food options like high sugar and high-fat foods. It has a bad reputation as the fat storing hormone but it is a necessary evil. It helps your body stay alert and deal with the danger in times of stress by increasing blood sugar, raising blood pressure, and suppressing the immune system.

Cortisol levels increase when it’s time to get up in the morning, then decrease as it gets closer to bedtime. Now, as I already said your body won’t understand whether there is a snake after you or it is just exam pressure. Had there been a snake after you the extra glucose released would have been used running away from it but since you just need to sit and write an exam the excess glucose is stored as fat.

This fat is stored mainly in the form of visceral fat around the belly. This particular belly fat is unhealthy and difficult to get rid of.

Over time, this repeated stress response takes a toll on your body. A recent study shows that increased cortisol levels overtime results in weight gain and obesity.

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Stress Screws Your Metabolism

We already know now that cortisol leads to fat storage but stress can even slow down the metabolism, further worsening the situation. A 2015 study conducted by researchers at Ohio State University found that stress was linked to a slower metabolism.

In the study, researches questioned women about the stressors they encountered the previous day after which they were fed 930 calories of a high-fat meal. It was observed that the women who experienced one or more stressor the previous day burned 104 calories less than the other women.

Stressed women also had higher levels of insulin, which results in more fat storage. They also had less fat oxidation which means most fat was stored and not used as energy.

To cut short, whether you eat more or less stress could result in slowing down your metabolism and fat burning, making you gain weight.

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The Timing Of Stress Matters Too

The human body has cells called precursor or progenitor cells that turn into fat cells causing weight gain. For a healthy person, only 1 percent of the cells turn into fat cells when they are triggered by hormones called glucocorticoids.

A person's glucocorticoids levels naturally change throughout the day, the rise and fall is controlled by our circadian rhythms. But something shocking was revealed in a recent study. These hormones can also be boosted by short- or long-term stress.

But that didn’t seem to make sense, since the level of glucocorticoids rises according to circadian rhythm we should be gaining fat cells every morning when the hormone rises or when the circadian rhythm is disturbed like while traveling to another time zone.

Tracking this protein in thousands of cells over the course of several days and using computer modelling revealed that the timing of your stress matters. The results suggested that even if you get significantly stressed you won't gain weight, as long as stress happens only during the day.

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Comfort Foods Can Worsen The Situation

Eating high-calorie food is known to cause weight gain but when you introduce a stressed environment the combination can become lethal. A team led by Professor Herbert Herzog, Head of the Eating Disorders laboratory at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, discovered in an animal model that a high-calorie diet, when combined with stress, resulted in more weight gain than caused by the same diet in a stress-free environment.

The study observed different areas of the brain in mice. Food intake is mainly controlled by a part of the brain called hypothalamus, while another part of the brain, the amygdala deals with emotional responses, including anxiety and stress.

It was observed that the stress-induced weight gain was due to the production of a molecule called NPY in the amygdala (produced both in mice and humans as well). When the production of this molecule was suppressed the weight gain reduced.

The culprit behind this NPY is no one else but insulin. Under normal condition as we eat our blood sugar rises which is followed by rise in insulin to send a signal to the hypothalamus that we need to stop eating. Chronic stress alone did not raise the insulin levels much, but in combination with a high-calorie diet, the insulin levels were 10 times higher than in a stress-free situation.

Prolonged high levels of insulin in the amygdala caused the nerve cells to become desensitised to insulin, which stopped them from detecting insulin altogether. These desensitised nerve cells boosted NPY levels, which both promoted eating and reduced the bodies' normal response to burn energy through heat.

All this together form a vicious cycle as stress will make you eat high-calorie diet and that diet along with stress will make you gain more weight than usual.

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How To Reduce Stress

Now since you are aware of what havoc stress can unleash on your body and how it can turn into a vicious cycle. The next step is to break out of this cycle. There are a few steps you can take to reduce stress and the complementary problems that come along with it.

1. Exercise

Exercising can decrease cortisol levels and can improve your mood. Exercise helps with both stress reduction and weight management. Whether you go for a walk after meals or go to the gym incorporating regular exercise into your routine is great for stress reduction. You could also try meditation or other breathing exercises like yoga and tai chi. However, avoid overdoing as high-intensity exercise can raise cortisol levels.

Also Read: Stretching Before Or After Exercise?

2. Sleep

Sleep is another factor which is related to both weight gain and stress. Lack of sleep causes stress and stress causes lack of sleep, this is a never-ending cycle. Lack of sleep also interferes with our appetite hormones, ghrelin, and leptin and result in increasing cravings. Getting a good night’s sleep is crucial to maintaining a stress-free healthy life.

3. Eating Right

Think before you eat. A 2011 review of studies that examined the link between self-monitoring and weight loss found that individuals who keep a food journal could manage their food intake more effectively. Install an app or use a journal that’s up to you but keep a tab on what and how much you eat. Include healthy food sources in your diet.

Also Read: Hunger Pangs And Cravings: Dealing Scientifically

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