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Chronic stress is a big contributor to weight gain for many people. Evidence of the association between chronic stress and weight gain is well established.
In addition to contributing to excess weight, chronic stress also increases the risk of developing or worsening hypertension, depression, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia.
Not surprisingly, there is a lot of science to explain why stress causes weight gain. Stress causes the release of two important chemicals in the body; a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine and a hormone called cortisol. Both of these chemicals are designed to be produced in small amounts from time to time. They help us with that fight or flight or freeze response – which is a good thing in the face of acute danger. You want plenty of norepinephrine and cortisol when you encounter something acutely dangerous like a car coming at you on the wrong side of the road or someone getting ready to fall down the stairs.
In acute situations like these, the body is triggered to start burning fat – in case it needs a boatload of energy to get itself out of the acutely dangerous situation. So acutely, briefly, these chemicals cause a decrease in body fat. But here’s the problem.
These chemicals were never meant to be released all day long.
Chronic elevation of these chemicals (or chronic stress) actually results in weight gain. Why? Chronic elevation of these chemicals is hard on our nerve cells. It wears them out. Without intervention, this wear and tear would eventually cause cell death. The body doesn’t like the idea of its nerve cells dying. So, when stimulation becomes chronic and threatening, the body releases another hormone called neuropeptide Y alongside these other chemicals. In addition to protecting the neurons, one of neuropeptide Y’s jobs is the store fat – and it wins.
Chronic stress leads to weight gain.
And that’s not the whole story either. When cortisol levels are high and prolonged, it also affects our ability to reason. We can’t differentiate between immediate and delayed gratification. So, we make impulsive decisions & irrational choices. Both animals and people increase their food intake when stressed – regardless of whether or not they’re hungry. As we say at Heartland Weight Loss all the time,
BIOCHEMISTRY DRIVES BEHAVIOR.
It’s really hard to fix the behavior without fixing the biochemistry first. And it’s hard to start fixing the biochemistry until you wrap your head around the problem in the first place.