Get Rid Of Stress Get Rid Of Fat

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When new clients come to see me specifically for weight loss, they inevitably ask me all sorts of questions relating to nutrition and exercise.  Interestingly enough, no one ever asks me about relieving their stress levels.  I find this concerning because stress is one of the most significant factors when it comes to gaining body fat.  So, why does stress contribute to gaining weight and how can you reduce your stress levels?

Cast your mind back 50,000 years or so and ask yourself what did hunter gatherer man have to stress about? In short it was being eaten or starving to death.

To cope with these two stressors, evolution gave humans a built in self defence mechanism.  When these 2 scenarios presented themselves to us, all sorts of physiological things happened inside us.  You may have experienced a few.

Ever find yourself walking late at night and without warning feel on edge?  The hairs on the back of your neck stand up, your pulse starts racing and all of a sudden you can see more clearly? This is you getting ready to either run or fight off an attacker?  It’s called your “fight or flight” response.  These sudden and automatic responses are caused by hormones reacting to our surroundings.

One of those hormones is, “Cortisol”.  It’s called the stress hormone.  Now one of the things the hormone does is prevent our body from using body fat as an energy source.  Another thing it does is drive all excess energy into body fat cells.  It does these things for 2 reasons, 1 we can’t use body fat for short bursts of sudden energy, we need glucose for that and the other is during times of famine, the body stores consumed energy as fat to enable us to survive till the next feast.

Now this was great 50,000 years ago but what are the chances of 21^st century western civilised man being eaten or starving to death? Zilch.  But we still have plenty of things to stress about.  In fact, we stress thousands of times more than hunter gatherer man ever had to deal with.  Picture this:  Your alarm doesn’t go off, meaning you’re late for work. There’s no hot water & your teenage son drank all the milk last night and there’s none for your morning cuppa.  The drive to work is compounding your lateness and your boss yells at you for missing an important meeting. Sound familiar?

As far as your body is concerned, you’ve just fought off 5 sabre toothed tigers and its only 10.00am.  Now if this pattern of living continues you have what the pros call “chronic stress” and the excess cortisol in your system is driving all that food you’re eating directly into storage.  And here’s the kicker, when we need nutritious food the most, it’s often when we eat the most rubbish.  Fast food, energy drinks and the like get consumed in large quantities by teenagers during stressful times like exams and ditto for management.

So, what can you do about it?  Learn to de-stress.  But how?  Easy, get your hands on my free e-book titled, “Stress, Cortisol & the Silent Obesity Creator”.

Simply ask me for a copy of my e-book by posting a comment in the space provided below I’ll send it to you FREE OF CHARGE!!!