Stress Can Cause Obesity to Spiral Out of Control

Stress Can Cause Obesity to Spiral Out of Control

If you’re struggling with obesity, being under stress can cause you to continue to gain. It can reach the point where the weight gain gets out of control. Stress is one of the key factors in packing on the pounds.

Part of the reason why you gain more weight if you’re under stress has to do with your hormones. When you’re stressed, your body releases cortisol. This stress hormone is helpful when you’re in a dangerous situation because it’s your flight or fight response.

But when you’re not in danger, your body is just flooded with cortisol and that cortisol prods you to want to eat. Not only does it make you to want to eat, but you find yourself pulled toward foods that are known to cause weight gain and health problems - foods like chips, cookies, cakes and fast foods are what you want.

There’s a reason the cortisol boost makes you want foods like that. It’s because when your body thinks there’s danger, it wants food in response to the hormonal outburst. Your body’s appetite increases, your digestion and metabolism slow down and your cravings feel like they went through the roof.

Because your metabolism slows down during stress, your body doesn’t handle calories or weight the same way it does when you’re not under stress. Along with the slower metabolism, stress causes changes in the way your body processes glucose.

You’ll find that your blood sugar can become elevated and stay elevated when you’re stressed. This leads to a desire to eat more, which then causes your glucose levels to rise sharply and quickly if you eat the sugary junk foods that are known to cause spikes.

Then those spikes fall, leaving you feeling jittery, and craving more sugary foods. When you’re stressed, you’ll eat greater portion sizes because you’re not so much feeding the hunger as you are trying to silence the emotions that go along with the stress.

Emotional eating has longed been linked with stress and people eat to feed emotions such as anger, sadness, depression, and anxiety. Overeating is also linked to the higher production of cortisol in your body that stress produces.

So what happens is stress triggers the changes throughout your body that lead to more hunger and combined with the slower metabolism, greater weight gain. This reaction that occurs isn’t something that can be fixed simply by dieting.

Because while the weight gain is the effect, it’s not the cause. The cause is the stress - and until you address the stress and deal with that, you’ll always have an uphill battle regarding weight gain.

Once you take care of the stress, you’ll find that it’s easier to stop the weight gain and lose the extra pounds because your body’s cortisol hormones will return to normal levels and your metabolism will pick back up.