Young girl doing yoga at the sea

Over thousands of years, your body has evolved to handle a stressful event by enabling you to fight and/or flee. Your distant ancestors had to fight those with whom they were competing for food and flee from predators who wanted to eat them. Your more recent ancestors’ fight or flight responses were finely honed during centuries of European wars and persecution by religious dictatorships.

The events that stress out your generation are very different and no longer require a physical fight or flight response. Between catching the overcrowded tube to work, the possibility of missing a deadline, and getting food on the table before the kids’ bedtime, all your modern stressors basically require you to stand or sit in one place. Your body has not caught up with this 21st century lifestyle and its traditional stress response that facilitates fighting and fleeing is not just inappropriate, but could potentially make you put on a lot of weight.

The first thing  your body does when it experiences stress is to secrete adrenalin to enable you to act quickly and powerfully to meet a physical challenge. Adrenalin is short-acting and remains in the body for only a few minutes. At this point your body ideally should, but fails to, detect that you have not engaged in some wild physical defence activity. Its stress response hence continues as if you have.

The second action your body takes is to secrete cortisol, which is meant to help the body recover from the effort it expended to flee from or fight off the predator. Cortisol remains in the blood for an extended period to replenish the resources your body used, and this is the culprit behind most of the weight gain.

• Cortisol increases blood glucose (commonly called blood sugar) by producing glucose from whatever non-carbohydrate substances it can find in the body. This suited your ancestors, because during their fight or flight, their muscles demanded glucose for energy which was then moved from the blood. It does not suit you, because you do not use your muscles in your stress response and your blood sugar is thus not depleted when you are stressed. The result will be constant high blood sugar which is the number one cause behind diabetes, because your body becomes resistant to the insulin that is supposed to move the glucose from your blood to the cells where they are needed.

• A high blood glucose level triggers the secretion of insulin to move glucose (commonly called sugar) from your blood to your muscles. Insulin opens your cells to receive the glucose. This suited your ancestors, because their muscles needed to be replenished after their fight or flight response. It does not suit you, because you almost never use your muscles to cope with the events that stress you. Your muscles are, thus, forced to receive a lot of unnecessary glucose which they then have no choice but to store as fat.

• Cortisol causes you to be less sensitive to the hormone leptin, which is meant to tell your body when it has stored enough food and needs no more. You thus have hunger pangs because your body ignores the leptin. This suited your ancestors, because their fight or flight used up stored nutrients which their bodies then had to replenish by eating. It does not suit you, because you use no nutrients during your stress response and it is not necessary for you to eat more. The result to stress is inevitably to over-eat. Even worse, since your body believes it has just used up a lot of energy, it is carbohydrates that it will crave once those hunger pangs start.

• Cortisol slows down secretion of testosterone, the muscle-building hormone. If your cortisol level is chronically elevated, your body cannot build muscles. Muscle tissue burns fat and thereby boosts your metabolism. Without muscle tissue, your metabolism will remain slow and fat will be stored rather than burned.

• A chronically elevated level of cortisol has other potentially harmful effects. For example, since its focus is on emergency recovery and replenishment of nutrients, it suppresses background maintenance tasks like the immune system, bone formation, muscle formation, and so forth. It also interferes with sleep and acts as a diuretic  to dehydrate you and rob you of essential minerals.

The danger in your body’s stress response is the cycle in which you become trapped.

• You stress.
• Your body secretes cortisol.
• You crave and consequently eat a lot of refined carbohydrates, which spike your blood glucose level even further.
• An hour later, your blood glucose level plummets because those refined carbohydrates have been taken out of your blood to be stored as fat.
• When your blood glucose level drops, your body secretes more cortisol to raise it again, as this is one of its primary functions.
• You then crave and eat more carbohydrates, because that is what you do in response to cortisol.

This cycle is hard to break, but you do have some control over it.

Stress Management Techniques

• Eat regular small meals that exclude refined carbohydrates like white flour and sugar. Whole grains and fibre are particularly good, because they are gradually converted into energy and thereby keep your blood glucose level consistent. No spiking, no plummeting, and consequently no unnecessary secretion of cortisol.

• Learn some direct stress management techniques. Mindfulness practices are popular and effective. If you want to tackle the thinking patterns that lead to your stress, try cognitive behavioural therapy.

• Sleep at least seven hours per night. A short afternoon nap is also refreshing. Most people do not want to sleep that much, because they have too much to do. Sleep will save you time, however, because you will be refreshed and able to work faster. 

• Exercise regularly, as it releases serotonin, the body’s positive mood neurotransmitter. Strenuous exercise elevates cortisol levels too, as it is needed to help your body recover from the exercise. You may, therefore, want to do only a moderate amount of exercise during particularly stressful periods.
• Engage in enough relaxing activities. Try something other than watching television, since your mind can still wander to your worries while doing something this passive.

• Adopt a pet. Dogs are particularly good, as they will drag you outside for healthy walks. But any pet will make you smile very many times a day.

• Avoid cigarettes and caffeine. They increase your heart rate, blood pressure, and consequently your stress levels.

Stress is not completely avoidable, but there is a lot you can do to decrease it and help your body cope with the response and avoid gaining weight because of out of control stress levels, and not enough time spent simply relaxing.