Stress is bad for you, but it can affect your weight loss goals, too. Even if you’re small and not trying to lose weight, stress can actually add extra pounds to your figure. How? If your mood changes, you’re more irritable, probably tired, getting too much or too little sleep, your appetite can go up and down and all around, with strange cravings to boot, and this can be blamed on a hormone called cortisol.
Cortisol can be good or bad, it’s evident in stressful situations to do things such as give you an increase of energy, up to your memory functions, bring up your pain tolerance and increase your immunity. However, when there’s too much cortisol in the body, bad things start to happen.
If you want to lose belly fat, you have to be at a relatively low amount of stress in your life, or you’ll gain it back, or go through the frustrations of trying to lose weight for nothing. With excess cortisol, your thinking can be disrupted and not as great as it usually is, your thyroid can become suppressed, and the thyroid does control weight gain and loss, causing you to plateau or gain weight, upset the blood sugar balance in your body, decrease bone density and muscle, raise your blood sugar and increase body fat.
It increases body fat because when your body is in a stage of flight, or stress, it will try to preserve as much fat as possible, going into survival mode. It specifically increases belly fat and can affect fat in other areas of the body leaving you susceptible to heart attacks and strokes.
When we’re stressed, we don’t want to lose weight, most of the time, we want to eat more, and because of survival instincts we’ve had for millions of years, our body stores that extra fat. If you stress over weight loss and your diet, this can cause a diet to actually fail. If you’re stressing over the diet, and feeling hungry, your body starts preserving fat instead of getting rid of it and it actually works against you.
A low-stress diet is the easiest way to lose belly fat and lose weight. A simple exercise routine helps, as well as helping with stress, decreasing the amount of cortisol released. A simple diet and exercise can lose belly fat, weight, and stress. Too much can actually increase it. Keep that in mind when you’re planning your diet and exercise routine!
