Is Stress Keeping You Fat?

Sometimes it seems like a losing battle – years of dieting and hours of exercise but the fat just won’t budge.

We all know about the calories in/calories out equation and if it’s right, all that dieting and exercise should have paid off by now.

If you have ‘stubborn fat’, maybe its more complicated than calories in/calories out.

If your life is full of constant stress it’s probably keeping you fat.  We tend to think of stress as mental – stress over work, money, family and relationships, but it can also be physical – lack of sleep, inflammation, chronic infections, exposure to environmental toxins, inadequate nutrition and over- or under- exercise.  And your body reacts the same to both.

If you’re totally stressed about life, work, family and finances, putting strenuous exercise on top (which is simply a physical stressor) only adds to your total stress load. And it could be holding you back.

Stress triggers adrenaline release and prepares your body for the ‘fight or flight’ response.  Digestion slows down and stuff like blood pressure and heart rate increase as your body gets ready to fight or flee.  We can cope well with this sort of acute stress – historically we would escape the danger over a short period of time.  In nature, 2 to 4 minutes would produce some kind of result from the (hypothetical) tiger chasing us.  We’d either fight or flee successfully or not.  Presuming we’re successful our stress hormones go back to a normal resting state until the next threat comes along.

Cortisol is also released in stressful times and one of its roles is to encourage you to eat after responding to the stress – all that energy expended fighting the tiger needs to be replaced.  Because our stress is typically mental not physical, we don’t use as much energy to face it so the urge to eat to replace energy is redundant.  Chronic elevated cortisol levels also has a bunch of wider effects through the body:

• Raising blood sugar levels and making your cells less sensitive to insulin
• Increasing belly fat and fatty liver
• Reducing the ability to burn fat
• Increasing the rate of fat storage
• Causing hormonal imbalances by disrupting the HPA (hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal) axis
• Encouraging constant hunger and sugar cravings
• Reducing DHEA (the precursor to repair and sex hormones), testosterone and growth hormone levels

Not all stress is bad, but when you’re under constant stress over long periods of time, your body produces these stress hormones at the expense of your rest and repair hormones.  Your stress hormones and repair hormones counterbalance each other, when stress hormones are being produced, your rest and repair hormones are not. Pregnenolone is the precursor to both your stress and repair hormones.  During chronic stress, pregnenolone is diverted to produce additional cortisol and adrenaline, leaving little or none for the production of repair hormones (this process is call the Pregnenolone Steal).  It’s the rest and repair hormones that you need to be working to help you lose fat.

It’s during the recovery process that your body will repair tissue, get rid of metabolic waste, restore optimal neural function and chemical and hormone balance, strengthen immunity and ultimately signal to the body to let go of excess fat.

So high intensity exercise during chronic stress supresses the rest and repair processes and can impair fat loss.  If you’re one of those people that’s constantly under stress and you do high volumes of exercise but fat loss isn’t happening, this could be the problem.

However, this doesn’t mean that you should stop exercising – it just means you need to recognise your stress load and manage your exercise and lifestyle more intelligently to find a balance – reducing volume and adding breathing and working in exercises, restorative yoga, tai chi or chi kung and addressing other lifestyle factors like sleep, hydration, nutrition.  Shifting the focus away from losing weight and towards being healthy will help to rebalance your body systems and encourage your rest and repair hormones to do their thing.

If you’ve been running on empty for a while now, the process will take time, a shift in mindset and a change in lifestyle but if you’ve been slowly reducing your calorie intake to next to nothing over the years, and the weight is still steadily piling on, what have you got to lose by taking a chance on a new approach?