Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Stress & Weight Management

Over the past twenty years or so, fitness and medical research has discovered a direct connection between individual stress levels and weight management issues. The only thing they don’t yet understand exactly is how or why these issues will occur. Weight management doesn’t necessarily mean weight gain either. Many people actually lose weight when they are under extended periods of stress - sometimes to dangerous levels. Weight gain is certainly one of the possible scenarios associated with stress and this sort of gain can easily perpetuate itself. A person can gain weight as a result of being stressed at work, home, or other emotional inlet and then can become further stressed by the societal implications of weight gain. Not a good cycle.

To better understand weight and stress related issues, we must first take a look at the two systems separately. The weight management system is actually the communication of your body when it is high or low on energy. Our energy is gleaned from food and drink and other ingested compounds and we are constantly monitoring this process unconsciously. Essentially this system determines hunger and thirst. When our body gets low on energy, we are supposed to become hungry, when it is low on water, we should get thirsty. But like any system, if there is a block or error in the chain of communication, the system breaks down and becomes confused. This may have happened at your work place once or twice.

The stress controlling system has to do with self-made products like hormones and enzymes. Our body creates it’s own communication devices out of protein and other elements to communicate with itself. If your gut wants your brain to know it’s hungry, it will release hormones into your blood which reach a part of your brain that tells you to recognize hunger. Stress, as it turns out, is a very powerful cause of hormone communication which should, in most cases, outweigh all other communications at the moment of stress. In fact some of the organs which release stress hormones into your body also manage the hormones for hunger and thirst. Evolutionarily, stress is the “fight or flight” response in our body. If we are in some sort of mortal danger, our system gets flooded with hormones that make us stronger, more alert, and more sensitive than we would be in a resting state. Whether our better choice in a stressful situation is “fight” or “flight”, because of these hormones, we will have the added energy and ability necessary to perform either.

There are three basic hormones that control the fight or flight stress response. While it’s not important to know exactly what their names are, it is of interest to note that two of these hormones actually suppress hunger, but the third encourages hunger. The two hunger suppressing hormones are released first in a situation of dire stress. If you are scared or in some kind of mortal danger, your body needs to be as responsive as it can to protect itself. It can’t bother with hunger at that moment, and it will therefore suppress this feeling in order to deal with the stress at hand. These two hormones only act for a short period of time, however - generally long enough to get us out of danger (not much more than a minute or two) and then they are consumed by our body. These hormones could be a reason that some people actually lose weight under stress. If someone’s body were unable to consume these hormones after the initial feeling of danger subsided, their hunger suppressing properties would still be active after the stress diminished. Since these hormones exaggerate alertness, it would be expected that a person having this sort of overload would also have trouble sleeping or comfortably relaxing in any situation.

It is potentially the third and final hormone, called cortisol, which gives people the most trouble with weight gain. If you are in a state of constant stress, though not such that you feel you are in mortal danger, you body would have released and consumed the first two hormones of the “fight or flight” response, but the third would continue to be released. Cortisol is the hormone which is necessary to maintain stability within the body systems during stressful situations. It is important to understand that cortisol causes neither weight gain or weight loss. It is simply a regulatory signal for your body systems to stay functioning since the other two stress hormones are so powerful. Because the other two do suppress hunger, cortisol helps to induce hunger - thereby negating the previous suppression.

If your body is in a state of constant stress, it is also frequently in a constant state of cortisol release. The glands which release the cortisol are under the impression that the other systems will require the stabilizing effects of this hormone. It is possible that a person who is under constant stress will too frequently become hungry.

The really messy part of stress and weight management occurs when one’s own fat cells induce stress. Yes, even fat cells release hormonal communication into the body. These hormones are related - not surprisingly - to energy and hunger. Fat in your body can serve as an energy source, but only when it exists in excess. Basic fat levels are necessary for protection of various organs like your heart and kidneys and also keep some internal communications like those for temperature and energy in a state of balance. Because the nature of fat is to maintain balance, when fat cells are in a state of loss (ie. fat burn from exercise), their first reaction is negative and perceived as stressful. In other words, when a person first starts exercising and dieting in an effort to lose weight, their own body is fighting them because this weight loss is adverse to the bodies understanding of its own current stasis. After a couple weeks or so this negative response is not perceived and normal weight loss can occur without much psychological effect, but your brain’s initial reaction to fat loss can be completely opposite of what you might expect.

Finally, in a worst case scenario - although not that uncommon - the ingestion of food will actually help to reduce stress in some people. The cycle here is not only obnoxious but difficult to recognize and often more difficult to break. Imagine you are constantly stressed. Maybe not to a perceivable level, but enough that your serum cortisol is high. This existence of cortisol makes you hungry. If you eat, you satiate the hunger only long enough to become stressed again. If you don’t eat, your stress level increases because now you are hungry and your gut is not receiving input that you are ingesting nutrients. Your body starts taking energy from fat. The fat gets mad and induces more stress so you become more hungry. Now the only way to feel better is to eat. So you eat a lot and for a brief moment you feel de-stressed until you get back in your car during rush hour or go back to your high stress job or have to deal with your difficult home life and the stress is back and the cycle starts again. It is not only extremely frustrating but also demoralizing to have the one thing you are trying to avoid - food - be the only thing that makes you feel comfortable. If you have these feelings, though, just realize that it is not because you are somehow weak or don’t have the will power to fight it. You just have to recognize that your body is constantly fighting your lifestyle (whether your chose that lifestyle or not) and the byproduct of your body engaging in this fight is for you to be hungry constantly.

With all these hormones running around, how do we know when is enough and how much is too much? Well, we don’t. This is the problem. A doctor can measure your “serum cortisol” levels in your body (essentially how much cortisol you have running around your system), but since cortisol itself is not a direct indicator of weight gain, this reading doesn’t tell us much. There are drugs which suppress the various stress hormones but these too do not affect one’s feeling of hunger. There are even drugs which suppress hunger but some of these actually induce a stress response so you can see why this may not work either. Unfortunately the answer to this problem is that there is as yet no simple answer. Since each person creates and reacts to stress differently, it is almost impossible to have a single fix to a problem which affects a good portion of this American population.

So far, the best way to combat stress and the weight management issues associated with stress is to actually take stock of and make adjustments to your life. Again, you may not immediately recognize that you are stressed because you haven’t felt the affects of those first two “fight or flight” hormones for quite a while, but the cortisol is still running around your body making you hungry. Or you may be under such stress that those first two hormones do get released way too often and you are losing weight to an unhealthy level. Either way, the first thing you have to do is recognize that you have some sort of stress in your life. One of the most common stressful situations is one in which have no control over changing or altering the stress. If you are in a difficult job or bad relationship or other stressful situation, the simple fact that you can’t alter that situation is stressful. Once you recognize that you have stress, you can take efforts to de-stress. You should have a chance to de-stress every single day if possible and if not every day then at least the vast majority of days in a week/month/year. You should spend at least an hour or more in this de-stressed mode whether that mode be exercising, meditation, taking yoga, watching television (without snacking), or sitting on the porch with a glass of wine watching a sunset, you need to do this activity often and without distraction. You may not be able to control the ability of your body to deal with stress the way you want, but you can manage that stress to the best of your ability. Sometimes you have to take care of yourself before all others. This may be the most effective method of stress and weight management you have. Find your best method to de-stress!

1 comment:

Janet said...

great article Austin. What do you do to relax??