IS STRESS MAKING YOU OVERWEIGHT?

I often ask, “Are you stressed?”, and people look at me and say, “What’s stress?” They can’t really answer me because living in a chronically stressed way has become their norm; they don’t know any different.

Living in a chronically stressed state shouldn’t be the norm. You see, your body has one main goal – to return as quickly as possible back to a state of balance (homeostasis or allostasis), because when your body is working from a place of balance you are healthy, and when you are healthy you have a greater chance of survival.

Anything which takes you out of a state of balance mentally and/or physically is a stressor. This could be cold or hot weather, wind, a virus, a negative thought, an injury, being stuck in traffic, trying to get the kids off to school in the morning; the list is endless. It seems we have evolved as a society to react to almost everything as a stressor, subconsciously viewing the world as a threatening, dangerous and hostile place.

Once upon a time a highly responsive stress response was an advantage because it kept us alive. The release of glucocorticoid steroids from the adrenal glands increased the heart rate, breathing rate, and blood flow to muscles and the brain. It constricted our blood vessels and shut down digestion. All of this contributed to our ability to fight the danger in front of us, or to flee. Those who were better at engaging the stress response were, on average, more likely to survive. Those who survived could reproduce and pass on this tendency to their children, so that over many generations more and more people were really good at engaging their stress response.

The problem is, in this day and age, the majority of us have adequate shelter, adequate food and clothing, our lives are not in danger on a daily basis, and we have really fantastic medical treatments. So surely we should hardly ever be engaging the stress response?

This is where psychosocial stress steps in. Psychosocial stress occurs when your stress response is triggered through thoughts, emotions and memories, instead of what is actually occurring in front of you. The emotional part of your mind has no way of discerning the difference between what is real and actually occurring, and what is imaginary.

A good example of this is when you watch a movie, say a horror or thriller. It’s the actor on the screen who is running away from a zombie, yet you are experiencing muscle tension, anxiety, nervousness; in a word stress. There is no zombie chasing you – you are in your lounge room all comfy and safe eating a bowl of popcorn – but your body is reacting as though it is. Make sense? 

The mind doesn’t know the difference. It doesn’t matter if there is a zombie in front of you for real or a zombie chasing an actor on the screen, your body is still going to pump out adrenal hormones causing biochemical changes in your body. This is psychosocial stress.

If the stress response is turned on for too long, you are going to get sick. Actually after a while your stress response is more damaging than the stress itself; this is what can cause stress-related illness. Chronic stress causes general wear and tear, diverts resources away from maintaining health, repair and homeostasis, and it can be tough to recover from your stress response. The stress response simply did not evolve to be chronically activated, however research shows that this is exactly what is happening in the majority of modern westernised humans.

It is not a matter of activating your stress response in the morning and then leaving it on all day. What actually occurs is that we re-activate our stress response over and over and over again, all day long. In a normal healthy human the stress response would be activated on occasion, here and there, followed rather quickly by the activation of the relaxation response which is designed to bring us back to a state of balance. However, when you activate your stress response over and over and over again throughout the day, you are never giving your body a chance to return to a balanced state. In fact we are so used to living this way that most of us think the stress response is our normal state. Anything which helps us to stay in a relaxed balanced state for prolonged periods may actually floor us because we are so unaccustomed to it.

It’s clear that we are all way over-stressed. What does this have to do with gaining weight and craving comfort foods?

Research shows that chronic stress is linked to greater fat stores and increased appetite; in particular an increase in cravings for comfort foods like simple sugars and fats. Remember how I said that when the stress response gets activated, we release glucocorticoids into our system? Well chronically high concentrations of glucocorticoids increase the expression of corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) in the emotional brain. Not only does this help to strengthen the chronic stress response but it also strengthens the motivation for ingesting comfort food, and systematically increases abdominal fat deposits.

Comfort food – food high in sugar (starchy carbs) and fat – seems to turn off the HPA-axis mechanisms which promotes a continued stress response, and in this way helps to decrease circulating glucocorticoid hormones. Put simply, eating comfort food helps to switch off the stress response; anxiety levels drop and you return to a balanced state. This is why you crave carbs when you are stressed. It is one of the ways in which your body tries to return to a state of balance.

But there is also another reason.

Every time you engage the stress response the release of glucocorticoid steroids (adrenal hormones) makes your body break down stored energy reserves and flush them into your circulation. This is to give your body access to as much energy as possible to fight or flight. These hormones also paradoxically shut down insulin secretion so glucose is kept circulating in the blood. 

However, every time you store energy away, then draw on it during a stress response, you pay a penalty, because the biochemistry of storage and mobilisation is not 100% efficient. It costs a little bit to generate storage forms of energy, it costs a little bit to mobilise them again.

So every time you mobilise storage forms of energy during a stress response, your body ends up stimulating appetite to replace the spent fuel, contributing to the increased hunger experienced.

Chronic stress also makes glycaemic control very difficult because you are alternating between mobilising resources and storing them, this leads to spikes and dips in your blood sugar levels. Every time your blood sugar levels take a big dip, your body stimulates the release of stress hormones like norepinephrine, which act to dump lots of stored energy (glucose) into your blood in an attempt to normalise blood sugar levels. Have you ever gone off to sleep only to awaken during the night, maybe at 2 am, wide awake? It is most likely that your blood sugar levels took a big dip, norepinephrine was released to normalise your blood glucose levels, and of course a flush of adrenal hormones into your system wakes you up.

Now before you start thinking that loading up on comfort foods is a great way to manage your stress, take a moment to think about what that means. The more excess food you put in your body, the more excess calories are converted to fat, which fills up your fat cells. When your fat cells get full, your body engages the stress response in an attempt to mobilise and use up this excess stored energy. 

Unfortunately activating the stress response leads to increased hunger, craving for, and therefore consumption of comfort foods which further fill up those fat cells – a vicious cycle. Eventually fat cells stop responding to insulin, insulin receptors become ineffective and in the long term insulin resistance develops. You end up with all this excess fat, glucose and cholesterol floating around in your blood stream which can lead to hyperglycaemia, hypercholesterolemia and eventually adult-onset diabetes.

Are the donuts and chocolate biscuits really worth it?

The good news is you don’t need to reach for the comfort foods in order to manage your stress. Managing your stress in healthy positive ways alongside the consumption of a low glycaemic diet can go a long way towards stabilising your blood sugar levels – you should sleep better, not crave comfort foods, step off the merry-go-round of stress eating and stabilise your weight.

Hopefully by now it is clear that if you want to achieve and maintain a healthy weight for your unique body, it is vital that stress management is included in your approach.

So what are some of these healthy positive ways to manage stress and therefore your waistline?

1. Exercise, find something you enjoy doing that gets your body moving and do it with some regularity (every day if you can). Exercise can be a source of positive or negative stress. If you engage in the exercise activity voluntarily with some sense of enjoyment, your body reacts in positive healthy ways. If you don’t like it or feel forced to do it then it becomes a negative stressor and may have a negative impact on your health. All forms of regular exercise benefit glucose control and can be equal to meditation in terms of initiating the relaxation response.
2. Daily mindful meditation practice. Mindful meditation exercises teach your mind and body to recognise when the stress response has been triggered, to then reflexively disengage the stress response, and return to a state of balance. Something as simple as regulating the in/out breath to the count of 4 engages the relaxation response extremely quickly. Other benefits of regular practice also include increased resilience, a strengthening of the ‘tone’ between the stress and relaxation response, decreased stress and anxiety, increased sense of inner calm and peace, reduced muscle tension, healthy blood pressure, increased immune function, and improved sleep.
3.  Laughter. Laughter is actually considered to be a positive stressor. Research has shown that simply anticipating laughter or an enjoyable event is enough to increase levels of endorphins and human growth hormone. This elevates your mood and increases immune function at the same time as reducing levels of glucocorticoids like cortisol and epinephrine. Other research has shown that regular laughter causes bodily responses similar to moderate physical exercise. Regular laughter enhances mood, decreases stress hormones, increases immune function, lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol and systolic blood pressure and raises HDL (good) cholesterol levels. Find what makes you laugh and gets you excited and do it often.
4. Be willing to change when you need to. This is called cognitive flexibility. This is all about how well we adapt to the changes in life and how willing we are to change what doesn’t work when and as needed. Change is inevitable, in fact it is necessary. The body you were born with is not the body you had when you were ten years old. The body you had when you were ten is not the body you have when you are twenty. The body you have today is not the body you had last year. The same goes with your thoughts. The thoughts you had 10 minutes ago have most likely passed on and right now in this moment new thoughts are passing through. Objects come and go, and people come and go. When we cling to things, people, ideas and perceptions expecting them to stay that way forever, we are really going against the natural order. Compare a stagnant pond to a running stream. The stagnant pond goes bad and stinks pretty quickly. Set the intention every day to go with the flow of the running stream of life and then follow through in your actions.
5. Social support. The social interaction experience must be perceived as positive and beneficial, otherwise this positive stressor becomes a negative stressor (we have all been there haven’t we). Research clearly demonstrates that rich supportive social interactions, networks and a ‘sense’ of belonging to a community or group increases our resilience to stress, improves immune function and lessens the negative impact of mental illness. So make sure to connect with your friends regularly, join a group of like-minded individuals that you can share some sort of experience or interest with. Let go of unhealthy relationships.

These are all positive healthy, proven methods of controlling stress and therefore appetite and comfort eating and in turn they all contribute to achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.

Yes, we may have evolved in a way that supports a chronic stress experience, but no, we do not have to be the victim of it. When we actively choose healthy stress management techniques, we are choosing to be the victor, taking on the responsibility for our lives and how we live it.

Ideas and concepts contained within this article were derived from the following sources:

• Benson, Herbert, 1975 (2001). The Relaxation Response. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-380-81595-8.
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