How to reduce your belly fat? - 02
Stress and Belly fat
One of my friends asked me (offline) how stress is related to belly fat.
All good books and articles about belly fat should tell you about stress and its major contribution to belly fat. So let us cover it in this series also.
Yes, stress plays a very vital role in belly fat.
What is stress?
As per Google, Stress can be defined as a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.
So what leads to stress?
Work - Examples - Unemployment, Too much work, too much competition at work, Long commute to work etc.
Family problems - Examples - Unhappy marriage, coping up with difficult parents / children etc.
Emotional difficulties - Examples - Taking care of a sick family member, Insecurity etc.
How is stress related to belly fat?
Generally, when our body / mind is stressed out, we tend to over eat, which leads to gaining more weight and also ending up depositing that 'too much' extra fat in the belly.
If a person is frequently stressed, his / her body generates more amount of hormones namely Adrenaline and Cortisol. While both these hormones have overwhelming impact on the body, we are more focused on Cortisol.
Cortisol
Cortisol plays a key role in regulating appetite, energy levels and how & where the fat is stored.
Cortisol’s important task is to upsurge blood levels of fat and sugar as quickly as possible. To do this, cortisol overpowers all bodily functions involved in growth, development and long term wellbeing to allocate all available energy and raw materials to bodily processes involved in emergency responses. It also acts on the liver and fat stores to release more energy as possible for use by the skeletal muscles and brain.
People acting as super humans during emergency situations are able to perform those actions only with the help of cortisol.
So impact and effects of cortisol are very beneficial in shorter run.
Stress and Cortisol
To understand the relation between stress and belly fat, let us consider a woman named Kumari. Kumari works as an accountant in a company. Her company has recruited many new employees and those new employees seem to have good knowledge of latest accounting techniques. Slowly Kumari’s mind develops job insecurity.
She is very much worried about her future and also doubts if she is fit enough for the current job. She predicts failure in near future and is very much worried about it. She is also not confident of finding a new job immediately if just in case she loses the current job. Losing her job will impact the financial stability of her family. She is very much worried.
Insecurity, uncertainty, fear etc. generates negative emotions which in turn triggers stress response!
Our body cannot differentiate between the actual stress response and this fake response... So it keeps generating cortisol thinking this is an emergency!
As mentioned earlier stress induces people to over eat. So Kumari in our example also eats more than usual food especially delicious food! And ofcourse these delicious food are very high in calories and contains more sweeteners and fat.
So her body keeps receiving unnecessary extra food throughout the day... And cortisol activates the body to store the energy in a place where it can be easily accessed and the best option available is abdomen!
Cortisol also keeps the blood sugar level high which in-turn increases the blood insulin level.
So with high cortisol and insulin, the body is forced to store more fat in belly! So slowly the belly fat accumulates and makes it an unhealthy body shape.
As we saw in the last episode, this leads to many diseases also.
So it is very important to fight against stress.
How to cope up with stress?
If you are feeling stressed, try to find out the reason for it and see if you can find a solution. For example if your job is driving you crazy, do not take it for granted. See if you can shift your department, job role or even company.
Too much stress can induce you into unhealthy habits like drinking (alcohol), eating junk food etc.
Try exercising, yoga, talking to your friend / relative to de-stress yourself.
If you tend to eat candies, cakes or other sweet snacks when you are stressed, then try to replace your favorite stress-food with few almonds or fresh fruits. Both almonds and fruits are healthy and can help you to cope up with stress induced food carving without in-taking too much calories.
Do you still remember the motivational factor that you selected in episode 1? If not rewind and store in your memory to keep yourself focused!
In our next episode let us talk about dieting! Stay tuned.