Curvie Girlie
New member
Preliminary Notes:
Hi, I wanted to share what I learned about stress, hormones, appetite, and how all these factors can affect weight loss or gain. I'm no doctor or expert, so please feel free to contradict this info or add any knowledge you've found or whatnot. This post comes mainly from the current issue of Women's Health and is geared towards a female audience, but it can apply to men, too, of course. I shortened it and made it more concise because I'm not partial to the writer, Judi Ketteler's, quips and writing styles (sorry--just being honest). I've also heard things along these lines for a while, and seen examples in my own life.
I think this is on the topic of weight loss because we all deal with stress, and we all have seen how it can hinder our weight loss efforts before. This is where "comfort food" comes in a lot. How many times have you been on a roll in your nutrition, only to have something you perceive as stressful happen, then all of a sudden your will power goes out the window and you find yourself inhaling cookies, ice cream, potato chips, or whatever? Maybe if we understand it a bit better we can come up with other ways to cope with stress besides eating. Maybe not. It's worth a shot.
After I post the gist of the article, I want to pose the question: What healthy ways do you deal with stress that compliment your weight loss/fitness gain efforts? And basically any conversation that opens from there, and maybe we can help each other out, too. How's that?
Stress and Weight Gain
In a survey of more than 1,800 people last year, the American Psychological Association re*ports, 43 percent of respondents admitted to overeating or to eating unhealthy foods in response to stress during the previous month. And wo*men were more apt to do it than men. Distress is your body's way of trying to maintain balance in the midst of threatening and fast-changing situations. Your body achieves that balance by releasing hormones. So whether you've lost your wallet or missed a period, your body deals in the only way it knows how: by signaling the adrenal glands to release the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
You're probably familiar with adrenaline's role as the fight-or-flight hormone; it gives you instant energy so you can get out of harm's way. In prehistoric times, we needed that boost to fight or outrun predators; today, it's still useful when you have to physically respond to a threatening situation.
The logic behind our need to feed under duress, however, is less obvious. After all, doesn't stuffing down cupcakes only make you lethargic? And isn't that the opposite of what you'd think should happen when adrenaline courses through your system? For the answer, you need to get familiar with cortisol. This other stress hormone is released by your adrenal glands at the same time as adrenaline, but you usually don't feel its effect for an hour or so. When you do, you know it--cortisol's sole function is to make you ravenous.
"Cortisol is one of the most potent appetite signals we have," says nutritional biochemist Shawn Talbott, Ph.D., author of The Metabolic Method. Some research suggests that it may interfere with the signals that control appetite (ghrelin) and satiety (leptin). Stress and cortisol might also cause our brain to find more pleasure in sweets. And because cortisol can mix up your hunger signals and suppress your brain's normal reward system, feeling tense may make you crave a decadent dessert even after a big meal.
While it might seem as if stress weakens your willpower, the real culprit is cortisol. The reason you want a brownie instead of raw veggies when you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic is that cortisol demands the most readily available sources of energy: high-fat, simple-carb foods that your body can use quickly. That's why big bowls of pasta, chocolate bars, and potato chips have gained comfort-food status--they're exactly what your body craves in times of trouble.
We're not the only animals who respond to stress this way. Studies have shown that even mice gravitate toward fatty foods when they're ticked off. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania offered lab mice their regular food and, for a one-hour window each day, as many high-fat food pellets as they could eat. When the mice were stressed (since rodents, as far as we know, don't sweat gridlock, researchers riled them up by exposing them to the odor of a predator, among other things), they scarfed as many of the high-fat pellets as they could in that hour, and ate even more day after day.
The Penn mouse study also suggests that women may be more sensitive to this particular effect of stress. Researchers found that when a single high-fat food pellet was buried in the creatures' bedding, the stressed-out female mice were much more motivated than the male mice to dig up the yummy nugget--uncovering it in an average of 60 seconds, while males took more than twice as long.
Researchers at Montclair State University found that men's and women's snacking habits also differ. A group of subjects were given puzzles, some of which were impossible to solve, then they were invited to snack on bowls of peanuts, grapes, potato chips, and M&M's. The women tended to eat more of a healthy snack when they were able to solve the puzzles but dipped into the chocolate more often when they couldn't. Men showed the opposite response, eating significantly more unhealthy snacks when they mastered the puzzles. Lead study author Debra A. Zellner, Ph.D., attributes the difference to men's and women's attitudes about "taboo" foods. Men tend to eat junk food as a reward--in this case, for having solved the puzzles. On the other hand, when female subjects (many of whom were on diets) got frustrated, they reached for taboo snacks to make themselves feel better.
That's a bad idea in more ways than one. "The more you try to restrict your calories, the more likely you are to gain weight," says neuroscientist Cliff Roberts, Ph.D., a senior lecturer with London Southbank University who studied 71 healthy female students who were enrolled in a nurse practitioner program. In the 12 weeks from the beginning of the term to finals, 40 of the women gained an average of five and a half pounds. All were habitual dieters who had exhibited the highest dietary restraint at the onset of the term, and all had significantly high cortisol levels. Roberts believes that the added stress of trying to maintain their weight while keeping up with their schoolwork created a vicious cycle: Stress drove them to eat; then eating (and the weight gain that followed) stressed them out even more and they resorted to filling themselves up with comfort food.
Chronically elevated cortisol levels from any kind of prolonged stress can affect weight even more over the long haul. For one thing, cortisol encourages the body to store fat--specifically, in the abdominal region--rather than burn it. It's nature's way of ensuring that resources are readily available for fuel when the body needs to perform life-preserving exertion or, for that matter, withstand famine. This all makes even more sense when you consider that abdominal fat has both a greater blood supply (so cortisol travels there quickly) and more receptors for cortisol. The hormone also slows the production of testosterone, which is essential for muscle building. Chronically low testosterone promotes loss of muscle mass, which ultimately can slow your metabolism.
So what can we do???
.......................................
Hi, I wanted to share what I learned about stress, hormones, appetite, and how all these factors can affect weight loss or gain. I'm no doctor or expert, so please feel free to contradict this info or add any knowledge you've found or whatnot. This post comes mainly from the current issue of Women's Health and is geared towards a female audience, but it can apply to men, too, of course. I shortened it and made it more concise because I'm not partial to the writer, Judi Ketteler's, quips and writing styles (sorry--just being honest). I've also heard things along these lines for a while, and seen examples in my own life.
I think this is on the topic of weight loss because we all deal with stress, and we all have seen how it can hinder our weight loss efforts before. This is where "comfort food" comes in a lot. How many times have you been on a roll in your nutrition, only to have something you perceive as stressful happen, then all of a sudden your will power goes out the window and you find yourself inhaling cookies, ice cream, potato chips, or whatever? Maybe if we understand it a bit better we can come up with other ways to cope with stress besides eating. Maybe not. It's worth a shot.
After I post the gist of the article, I want to pose the question: What healthy ways do you deal with stress that compliment your weight loss/fitness gain efforts? And basically any conversation that opens from there, and maybe we can help each other out, too. How's that?
Stress and Weight Gain
In a survey of more than 1,800 people last year, the American Psychological Association re*ports, 43 percent of respondents admitted to overeating or to eating unhealthy foods in response to stress during the previous month. And wo*men were more apt to do it than men. Distress is your body's way of trying to maintain balance in the midst of threatening and fast-changing situations. Your body achieves that balance by releasing hormones. So whether you've lost your wallet or missed a period, your body deals in the only way it knows how: by signaling the adrenal glands to release the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
You're probably familiar with adrenaline's role as the fight-or-flight hormone; it gives you instant energy so you can get out of harm's way. In prehistoric times, we needed that boost to fight or outrun predators; today, it's still useful when you have to physically respond to a threatening situation.
The logic behind our need to feed under duress, however, is less obvious. After all, doesn't stuffing down cupcakes only make you lethargic? And isn't that the opposite of what you'd think should happen when adrenaline courses through your system? For the answer, you need to get familiar with cortisol. This other stress hormone is released by your adrenal glands at the same time as adrenaline, but you usually don't feel its effect for an hour or so. When you do, you know it--cortisol's sole function is to make you ravenous.
"Cortisol is one of the most potent appetite signals we have," says nutritional biochemist Shawn Talbott, Ph.D., author of The Metabolic Method. Some research suggests that it may interfere with the signals that control appetite (ghrelin) and satiety (leptin). Stress and cortisol might also cause our brain to find more pleasure in sweets. And because cortisol can mix up your hunger signals and suppress your brain's normal reward system, feeling tense may make you crave a decadent dessert even after a big meal.
While it might seem as if stress weakens your willpower, the real culprit is cortisol. The reason you want a brownie instead of raw veggies when you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic is that cortisol demands the most readily available sources of energy: high-fat, simple-carb foods that your body can use quickly. That's why big bowls of pasta, chocolate bars, and potato chips have gained comfort-food status--they're exactly what your body craves in times of trouble.
We're not the only animals who respond to stress this way. Studies have shown that even mice gravitate toward fatty foods when they're ticked off. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania offered lab mice their regular food and, for a one-hour window each day, as many high-fat food pellets as they could eat. When the mice were stressed (since rodents, as far as we know, don't sweat gridlock, researchers riled them up by exposing them to the odor of a predator, among other things), they scarfed as many of the high-fat pellets as they could in that hour, and ate even more day after day.
The Penn mouse study also suggests that women may be more sensitive to this particular effect of stress. Researchers found that when a single high-fat food pellet was buried in the creatures' bedding, the stressed-out female mice were much more motivated than the male mice to dig up the yummy nugget--uncovering it in an average of 60 seconds, while males took more than twice as long.
Researchers at Montclair State University found that men's and women's snacking habits also differ. A group of subjects were given puzzles, some of which were impossible to solve, then they were invited to snack on bowls of peanuts, grapes, potato chips, and M&M's. The women tended to eat more of a healthy snack when they were able to solve the puzzles but dipped into the chocolate more often when they couldn't. Men showed the opposite response, eating significantly more unhealthy snacks when they mastered the puzzles. Lead study author Debra A. Zellner, Ph.D., attributes the difference to men's and women's attitudes about "taboo" foods. Men tend to eat junk food as a reward--in this case, for having solved the puzzles. On the other hand, when female subjects (many of whom were on diets) got frustrated, they reached for taboo snacks to make themselves feel better.
That's a bad idea in more ways than one. "The more you try to restrict your calories, the more likely you are to gain weight," says neuroscientist Cliff Roberts, Ph.D., a senior lecturer with London Southbank University who studied 71 healthy female students who were enrolled in a nurse practitioner program. In the 12 weeks from the beginning of the term to finals, 40 of the women gained an average of five and a half pounds. All were habitual dieters who had exhibited the highest dietary restraint at the onset of the term, and all had significantly high cortisol levels. Roberts believes that the added stress of trying to maintain their weight while keeping up with their schoolwork created a vicious cycle: Stress drove them to eat; then eating (and the weight gain that followed) stressed them out even more and they resorted to filling themselves up with comfort food.
Chronically elevated cortisol levels from any kind of prolonged stress can affect weight even more over the long haul. For one thing, cortisol encourages the body to store fat--specifically, in the abdominal region--rather than burn it. It's nature's way of ensuring that resources are readily available for fuel when the body needs to perform life-preserving exertion or, for that matter, withstand famine. This all makes even more sense when you consider that abdominal fat has both a greater blood supply (so cortisol travels there quickly) and more receptors for cortisol. The hormone also slows the production of testosterone, which is essential for muscle building. Chronically low testosterone promotes loss of muscle mass, which ultimately can slow your metabolism.
So what can we do???
.......................................
I'm with you on that. I love food and I almost never feel guilty for indulging anymore. What's the point? I try to practice moderation, if I screw that up, life goes on and I enjoyed myself at least. I bet feeling guilty about eating just makes someone more twisted about their relationship with food to begin with. Still, I'm happier if I know I don't physically need the food to sustain energy, and I choose something other than eating if I'm stressed out.