Why Too Much Stress Makes YOu Fat and What to Do About It
This is something that has come up a lot lately with my clients — literally 100% of them are overtaxed from too much stress. And 100% of them feel like they’re overweight.
This is not a coincidence.
The Obvious Factors
We know that, during times of stress, it’s more difficult to maintain a healthy eating pattern.
Why?
Well, the mind panics so you reach for “comfort food” that has made you feel good about life in the past, or you’re running low on time and you don’t have space in your brain for meal prepping, so you hit up the drive-thru.
Overall, we know that stress leads to impaired decision-making, diminished drive or willpower, unhealthy habit loops, binge eating, survival-mode tactics, and much more — all of which are tied with the idea that too much stress leads to the consumption of unhealthy food.
What else?
Shocker, but stress affects your sleep — both the quantity and quality. I’m not sure how much I can stress this to my clients and readers, but without proper sleep, literally no amount of health can be sustainable. Sleep is the ultimate underlying factor that we so often overlook.
No, you really don’t function well on five hours of sleep. Especially when those five hours begin at 2 AM.
Being underslept leads to cravings, incomplete recovery overnight, disrupted hormone balance, etc. which plays into the chronically stressed state and poor dietary habits.
The Stress Hormone Cascade
I’m thinking by now you’ve heard of the hormone cortisol.
It’s secreted from the adrenal glands in response to a prolonged stressor. Epinephrine (adrenaline) is also secreted from the adrenals in response to stress, but this is more sudden — that stomach-drop, instant-sweat feeling.
Because of this timing difference, cortisol has more long-lasting effects on the body.
Prolonged elevations in cortisol can trigger sugar cravings, because evolutionarily speaking, we’d need this quick type of fuel to power us through this “fight or flight” situation. As you can imagine, reaching for quick carbs over the long-term can lead to things like insulin resistance and weight gain.
Cortisol also mobilizes stored glucose into the bloodstream for quick internal fuel, so even without packing in the carbs, you could still be packing on the pounds. Your circulating blood sugar levels can remain elevated and trigger the pancreas to continually secrete insulin to handle it. High levels of insulin in the blood, on a regular basis, can lead to obesity.
As you might expect, constant blood sugar spikes (from poor dietary choices, stressful experiences, etc.) and the subsequent insulin secretion to shuttle that glucose into your cells leads to lowering blood sugar… but this can occur too quickly, causing hypoglycemia symptoms like dizziness, nausea, weakness, brain fog, fatigue, etc. For some this situation can be life-threatening.
When blood sugar drops like that, the pancreas pumps out glucagon to raise blood sugar back up to levels needed to be a functioning human, but eventually this is not enough. The adrenals are then prompted to release epinephrine and cortisol.
And the cycle continues.
Enter caffeine dependency, needing to eat every couple hours, sleep disturbances, mood disorders, etc.
The Long-Term Effects of This
Summary: weight gain is often a symptom of hormone imbalance — specifically, dysregulated cortisol patterns — and NOT just “calories.”
In these chronically stressed patterns, the body gets out of whack with both the timing and how much cortisol to make on any given day, which leads to things like weight loss resistance.
This whole stress/cortisol dysregulation issue takes one of our fight-or-flight systems offline — meaning the body doesn’t secrete cortisol at the appropriate times. Not having these appropriate cues forces the body to prioritize short-term survival, therefore picking and choosing what can be put on the backburner. Often, this is weight loss — especially because survival means that the body requires additional fat stores to use in emergencies for fuel and protection.
The things it decides are unnecessary to spend energy on are things like proper digestion, reproduction (including libido!), hair and nails, stable energy, etc.
Essentially, unless you get into the root cause of weight gain and chronic stress, things are not going to change, no matter how many calories you do or don’t eat, no matter how many hours you put on the treadmill, no matter how many supplements you take.
True. Weight loss. Comes from. Addressing chronic stress first, period.
What Stressors Can Look Like
Things that have a net positive effect on either the physical, mental, or emotional body, such as:
Exercise (cardiovascular, resistance training, etc.)
Cold showers or cold exposure
Education (studying, working on projects with others, etc.)
Fasting
Breathwork
Eating, just in general (the body has to digest, absorb, and utilize these nutrients, which takes work and disrupts homeostasis briefly)
Alcohol (which could debatably be in the category below)
Things we might typically associate with the word “stressor,” like:
Illness, injury, or emotional trauma
Exposure to toxins, like pesticides in food, diesel in the air, hormone disruptors in cleaning products
Financial problems
Electromagnetic fields, radiation exposure
Traffic, overflowing emails, overcommitting to external obligations, confrontation, etc.
What Chronic Stress Can Look Like
Always running late
Always being exhausted
Always being inflamed
Unable to think straight unless you’ve had 34 cups of coffee
Constant snacking, constant carb cravings
Waking up in the middle of the night, wide awake, either to pee or because you’re hungry, or both
Health markers trending in the wrong direction — blood pressure, resting heart rate, cholesterol, etc.
Anxiety, depression, other mood disorders
Frequent headaches or migraines
Fertility issues
Premature aging
The dreaded weight gain
Why This Matters to You
If you’re chronically stressed, you’re not going to be losing weight anytime soon. The body needs to feel safe in order to allow the burning of stored body fat (which is what most people mean when they say they want to lose weight).
Chronic cortisol, blood sugar, and insulin elevations = body is NOT feeling safe. In fact, this cascade is sending quite the opposite message: DANGER.
Until you handle this, you may even GAIN weight — even when you’re doing everything else right. And that often causes folks even more stress — doing everything “right” and seeing no results, which can lead to negative self-talk and downward spirals in motivation and action.
Don’t let this be you. Get ahead of it.
What to Do Now
It’s highly likely that you can’t actually reduce the amount of stress you have in your life. If it were possible, it would probably already be handled.
First and foremost, list out the things that cause stress in your life. This includes net positive things, like exercise or drinking beers with your friends (you can use the list above as a reference, although it’s not exhaustive by any means). Anything that temporarily challenges the balance and homeostasis of the body, is a stressor. So list it all.
Then figure out what stressors on this list really trigger bad fight or flight responses in you. What stressors give you anxiety? What stressors make you dread that part of your day or week? What stressors make you sick to your stomach to think about?
Those are the ones we need to tackle.
And again, it won’t be to remove them, because for most of us in this technological, productivity-driven society, that’s not likely.
I’m talking about learning to anticipate these tough stressors that leave you chronically drained, and have tools in place to handle them and build resilience for next time. Here are some examples:
Spending more time outdoors — research shows time spent in “green spaces” (literally, getting the color green from the outdoors into your eyeballs) helps lower overall stress and cortisol.
Spending more time off screens — yeah, yeah, I know, I’m annoying to even bring that up. We’re all addicted, myself included. It’s an active habit change that’s going to look different every day, but well worth the effort.
On that note, even avoiding looking at your phone first thing in the morning can help. Make mornings about you and your family, not the 80 new emails or doom scrolling on Instagram. I heard a great mantra on a podcast recently — “my phone serves me at MY convenience, not the other way around. The ones who know and love me will respect me taking time to get to them, when it’s convenient for ME.” Preach.
Moving your body — the whole point of cortisol spiking blood sugar is to USE it! The skeletal muscles are primed and ready during times of stress to be activated and used. Even going for a shot walk a couple times a day to “walk it out” is going to be helpful. Be mindful not to overtrain, as this could actually increase your overall chronic stress load.
Doing the dishes — seriously, surveys have shown that a lot of people find this therapeutic since it’s so automatic but also involves using your muscles and burning through some of that fight or flight juice mentioned above.
Reflect daily on the non-weight-related ways that your body showed up for you today. This could look like:
My awesomely strong legs kept me upright as I tripped on the crack in the sidewalk today.
They were shaking, but my shoulders held up that [insert heavy object here] for over 10 minutes!
I paid extreme attention to detail on today’s project thanks to my careful dexterity and steady hands.
Other ways to shift your mindset will come in a future post.
Surprise! I have a free resource to help you with chronic stress.
I created a free 8-page ebook on how to anticipate, handle, and recover from chronic stressors. It discusses the signs and symptoms to look out for in terms of unidentified burnout and hormone imbalance due to stress, practices to put in place that cater to a whole bunch of different preferences, and much more.
When I said free, I meant free. No gimmick. I just want to help people and reach as many as possible with this information.
You can click here to download it. Send this link to anyone you think might benefit from it.
I aim to serve, so let me know in the comments below what you thought about this post and the ebook linked above. I’d love to hear your feedback!
Yours in health,
