Stress And Weight Gain

I’ve touched on this particular topic on my landing page; naturopath for weight management but I can’t tell you much we underestimate the role stress plays in weight gain.

I often find myself sitting across from clients who are extremely frustrated and finding that eating well and exercising doesn’t always equate to weight loss. But isn’t it a simple calories in calories out equation??… If only it were that simple.

So in this post, I’m going to delve a little deeper into how stress impacts weight. I’ll also cover some of the key points around building resilience as expecting stress to disappear is simply unrealistic.

So Does stress make you fat?

Cortisol is one of the main stress hormones that actually pushes glucose out of the tissues and into the blood stream.

Psychosocial stressors are the main ones we’re all dealing with on a daily basis things like;

A lack of control over our environment and those around us.

Issues around social- familial demands and this would have to be one of the main ones for my mums out there who are juggling it all, kids, work, running a household and possibly running your cortisol sky high.

but also more transient anxieties, break-ups, loss of job, major personal injury or illnesses.

So in taking a closer look at how our stress hormones impact weight, this is a great image at a glance we can start to see some of the impacts:

Taken from Naturopathic Dr News and Review.com

Interesting to note the top right hand corner of this diagram, you’ll see physical activity feeding into obesity, and you might think how can that be?

All the research shows that exercise is great for your health right?

If you’ve hit a wall in your weight loss and the weight is not coming off you need to consider that high intensity exercise is a form of stress on the body and you may benefit from actually stripping it back in order to reduce those stress hormones.

When you have an over active HPA (Hypothalamic Pituitary axis) or poorly regulated stress response, this can lead to some of the following:

An increase in the enzyme responsible for storing fat- it’s called lipase

Insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia

An increase in visceral fat storage is commonly referred to as the muffin top. Storage of fat in this part of your body also puts you at greater risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease as the fat puts pressure on your organs.

Dyslipidemia —fancy word for an abnormal level of fats running around in the blood stream. Interestingly this can also be a factor in slim clients who come in with high cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood work. They’re often told by their health practitioners that they need to cut fat, but addressing the stress can help significantly along side dietary modifications.

As you may well know, having an increase in the amount of fat circulating in the blood will also increase your risk of cardiovascular diseases.

You’re also more likely to binge eat, over eat, snack and use food to pacify you when stressed.

Start listening out for internal dialogue like:

“I’ve worked hard I deserve a treat”

“Why did I just eat that I wasn’t even hungry?” 🙄

“I don’t have patience for this S?!t.”

Developing more mindful awareness around mood and food can go a long way to shifting old patterns.

What to do when you can’t remove all the stress from daily life?

Okay, so expecting to be able to remove the stressors of everyday life is simply unrealistic, but we know that when you’re exposed to long term stress your body becomes maladapted. Allostatic load is a term often used to address the burden on the body that builds from trying to adapt to the stress.

So much of our behavior is unconscious, automatic even when it comes to what we eat.

What’s needed is a re-calibration of sorts, learning how to create new patterns and responses to what we perceive as being stressful.

Cognition plays an important role in determining what is stressful, which underlines the significant differences in how you respond to stressful situations. Your thoughts of course dictate your behaviour.

Key factors in this behavioral response include the interpretation of an event, differences in bodily conditions and, finally, the choices of compensation to stress.

Therefore, your brain can also determine the behaviors and habits that make life more or less dangerous and developing these cognitive skills may increase your allostatic load in the long-term.

Working with strategic psychotherapy and hypnotherapy as a tool to start shifting some of these unconscious patterns can be very effective. One study finding, those who practiced self hypnosis experienced lower calorie intake and lost more weight than controls. They also reported feeling satisfied for longer.

Results are improved with hypnosis when treatment is individualized and targeted addressing your individual patterns.

How do I know if stress is impacting my weight?

Working with an experienced health practitioner, who will take an in-depth health history,
can be immensely helpful. Looking at contributing factors like:

Breathing patterns

Sleep

Assessing current stress rating

Nutritional deficiencies in particular vitamin D, B vitamins which can lead to an increase in anxiety and depression.

Blood pressure

Variable heart rate

Salivary cortisol

This last one salivary cortisol is a functional pathology test, one I run on many of my clients who are struggling with weight. The assessment of free cortisol in saliva can give us some insight into the HPA axis. Although cortisol concentrations in the saliva are approximately 30–50% lower than in the blood—its collection is noninvasive and stress free (couldn’t help myself 🙄) and can be easily retested to track progress.

Worth mentioning here is that not all binge eating is related to stress and anxiety for some clients it’s linked to boredom, and a lack of stimulation. Understanding what is the primary trigger for you and coming up with new more constructive patterns is key.

Stress management for weight loss

Several studies have shown that chronic long term stress will change your food satiety, decreasing your sense of satisfaction with food and leading to you reaching out for high caloric foods and more often.

We have to address the long term low grade chronic stress!

Losing Weight With A Holistic Approach

What can you start doing now??

Have a salivary cortisol test

Keep a diet diary this alone can bring more conscious awareness to your food intake

Get some support with hypnotherapy

Consider mindfulness training around food, research has shown that after some training in mindfulness subjects had significantly lower levels of circulating cortisol.

Coco Flavonols- studies have shown chocolate may actually help to decrease cortisol by blocking some of its uptake. We’re talking high quality, dark chocolate, free of sugar. I really enjoy PANA. It’s amazing if you haven’t already you need to give it a try. 🤤

For all my ladies out there, there is a connection between weight and sex hormones. We know that overweight women have more androgens- testosterone. This can lead to a myriad of additional symptoms like facial hair growth, cystic ovaries and the likes. So, if this is part of your picture best get your sex hormones checked with your health practitioner.

But I’m Always Hungry!

Leptin is the hormone that sends signals to your brain letting you know that your fat cells are full and you no longer need more calories. We know that people who struggle to lose weight, leptin resistance is commonly an issue.

You can assess leptin resistance clinically, however there are several factors that directly influence leptin resistance. Things like, no snacking, not eating 4-5 hours before bed, and screen darkness an hour from sunset.

Time restricted eating also improves this factor if appropriate for your current health status, you can try and keep your consumption of food to an 8 hour window.

This only further establishes the importance of getting the right support from a practitioner you connect with and who you can work with in order to find the right path to loosing that weight.

Address sleep issues, if you have sleep apnea this needs to be looked at and dealt with. An at home sleep test is a fantastic took to start getting some idea of where you are with this, easy and very cost effective but we know that a lack of proper quality sleep will absolutely impact your ability to loose weight.

The yoyo approach doesn’t work and can actually do some long term damage to your metabolism and stress response. Look at addressing this issue once and for all.

Consider the long term costs if you don’t address the weight, the extra weight putting you at risk of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and even Alzheimer’s.

Consider making this a priority and making considerable changes where the cause of the issue actually starts, the focus is all too often on the number on the scales and the fat. What would happen if you focused on the driving factors behind your eating and blood chemistry?

If you enjoy geeking out and would like to do some further reading on this particular topic this scientific paper might be of interest.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out by using the contact form below.