How Stress Cause Fat, Weight gain and Chronic Diseases

I have attended a retreat that talk about contemplative and meditative prayer and how to communicate with God via Journaling. It’s a very eye opening experience. Each part of us are longing for this silence at heart. But we come into this world with full of noise. We have to do something, always at the go, we have to act. Stress is left and right being put on us. Or we have to become or achieve this and hat by what age. So we keep working and working, busy and busy. No wonder there are so much stress around our life.

I have also talked with a lot of my gal friends, and they will complain about how stress their working life has been. One of my gal friends even has to deal with acute acne in her face due to the stress hormone. The doctor even told her that there is nothing he can do anymore with her skin unless she cut down her stress.

Another friend also tells me that she wonder why she never lost weight no matter how much diet and exercise she tried. Another friend even thinks that she gains weight by breathing the air only.

Here in my study, I learn that there is the relationship between Fat, Stress and Weight & disease. Acute stress shuts down digestive activity, but once the threat is over, stress hormones and digestion usually return to normal. Continuing stress can trigger numerous lives – limiting disorders and conditions, from heart disease and gastro esophageal reflux disease (GERD) to irritable bowel, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes.

How is it happen?
When the body gears up to deal with stress, two stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, are released to mobilized fat and carbohydrates stored in the body for the quick energy needed for the ‘flight-or-flight” reaction. Once the acute stress is over, adrenaline goes away but cortisol stays around to help refuel the body and bring it back into balance.
Once of the ways it does this is by giving us a raging appetite that drives us to replace the carbs and fats we’ve used up in the crisis. Even though our stresses today are more likely to be intellectual or emotional, our Paleolithic body still react to them as if we were about to do battle with a saber-toothed tiger.

Under chronic stress, levels of the adrenal hormone cortisol remain high, creating a building of abdominal fat, our primitive emergency supply, and suppressing thyroid function. (Please bear in mind that cortisol also has many other functions like influencing sugar control, anti-inflammatory effect, and aids immune system function.

Normally, cortisol levels drop after the stressful event. But in modern times, when people often are pushed beyond their normal coping ability to handle stress, elevated cortisol levels become chronic, leading to many functional problems including dressed immune function, low thyroid function, problems with sugar control and eventually, adrenal fatigue (“burnout”), and other chronic illness.

So stress eating and weigh gain are the result of cortisol stimulating insulin, the hormone manager of fat stores, to promote fat storage.

People with adrenal exhaustion have toxic stress. Adrenal exhaustion can have a life threatening effect on our body, including increasing our susceptibility to illness and impairing memory and concentration. Toxic stress stimulates higher than normal levels of cortisol.

When stress hormone stays high, it causes increase appetite, which adds on extra kilo. After 40 years old, the extra kilo accumulate deep inside the belly, below the abdominal muscle wall, stored for the flight-or-flight reactions that we have little need of today.

Further more, with continued stress, we are likely to develop metabolic syndrome, a complex health problems that include high blood pressure, high heart rate, diabetes, and increased risk for stroke, blood clotting, and colon cancer. No wonder these diseases are the highest among most Singaporean that I met now. With this high level of stress in everyday at work, unbalance family life and social pressure, I saw many of my friends use chocolate, cake, sweets, ice cream or fast food to numb down their stressful feeling.

I sadden me to see some friends who needs to take medication everyday so that they can suppress their migraine, skin allergy, antibiotic, etc and continue their meeting and work as usual. How long this can survive? Is our health is not the most important thing in our life? If we don't respect it and taking care of it, who will then? Can we still still enjoy the money and reputation that we earn when we are not in the optimum condition?