Have you ever found that despite your exercise and nutrition plans you’re still not reaching your weight loss goals?

Maybe your struggling to stick to your exercise and nutrition plan.

Or even worse – maybe your actually gaining weight.

Have you ever sat back and wondered why or how this could be happening to you? Well, you’re not alone. Thousands of people are in a similar place, left wondering why their best efforts are lost.

In many cases the answer is stress. There are undebatable links between stress and weight gain and could be the underlying reason you are not getting the traction you desire when it comes to weight loss.

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Stress can be triggered by a number of things but is often cause when we’ve set expectations for ourselves that we can’t meet. It can be as simple as running late for an appointment or writing lengthy to-do lists only to realize we can’t get everything done. Heck, some of us actually stress that we’re not meeting our weight loss targets – now how counterproductive is that!?

There are a few different reasons why stress impacts weight loss – lets dive in and break it down.

What Effects Does Stress Have on Our Body?

Have you ever wondered why, after times of stress, you always get sick?

In times of stress, our body releases a hormone called cortisol which increases blood sugar, raises blood pressure, suppresses the immune system and curbs your metabolism.

Now, you’re probably wondering why the hell your body would produce such a hormone. And that’s a fantastic question! In short, the answer is that thousands of years ago, before we had all the pressures of modern day society, we would only get stressed when there was life-threatening danger. Think of going out hunting for food for your village and seeing a tiger.

In these situations, cortisol is incredibly valuable as it essentially shuts down all non-essential bodily functions for that period of time to enable your body to do superhuman things, such as jump into trees, run really fast, etc.

However, in today’s world where we don’t have to go out into the jungle hunting for food, there are far fewer life-threatening situations. However, there is more pressure to do things just to do things, the length of time our bodies are subject to cortisol is much greater. Which means the increased levels of sugar and cortisol in the blood remains in circulation for longer – causing more damage.

Why Stress Causes Weight Gain

Once the inertia of the stress has settled your adrenaline high wears off. However, your body continues to produce cortisol to help replenish your energy supply as fast as possible.

This is where sugar cravings go next level. As a protective mechanism, during this time your body is designed to store energy. Remember that your body still interprets stress – irrespective of what causes it – as a response to life-threatening danger.

One of the issues with this is that you mainly store this excess energy as belly fat which is the most dangerous type. Stress causes you to gain belly fat. Literally.

Have you ever noticed that when you get stressed your desire for comfort foods increases? And that these comfort foods are packed full of sugar, fat, and salt? This compounds the problem stress causes.

In summary, the 5 Reasons Your Stressed-Out State Is Stopping You from Losing Weight are:

1. Your body shuts down noncritical functions
2. Cortisol releases additional sugars into the bloodstream
3. Cortisol stops insulin production which is the hormone that removes sugar from the bloodstream
4. Cortisol makes you crave comfort foods full of sugar, fat, and salt
5. Cortisol actually ‘forces’ your body to store belly fat

What to Do About It?

Make Sure Your Getting Sleep

Stress can cause you to lay awake at night and the lack of sleep causes you to stress. It’s a vicious cycle that ends in craving sugar, increasing caffeine intake (which increases the tax on your adrenal glands, further causing you to crave sugar) and can also impact your appetite.

To help get you out of this rut try the following:

• Avoid fatiguing exercise 2-4 hours before bed.
• Avoid large meals and drinking large amounts of water 2 hours before bed
• Dim the lights in your bedroom an hour before bed
• Put away your electronic devices 45 minutes before bed
• Try practicing mindfulness before you go to bed (more on this below)

Exercise More

Exercise is proven to decrease cortisol and release endorphins that increase your mental wellbeing. That’s not to say go out and perform strenuous exercises – that can actually raise cortisol levels temporarily.

Yoga, walking, or other low-intensity exercises are best suited when you are stressed. The added bonus of yoga is that it helps with mindfulness as well (more on this below).

We highly recommend yoga check out this 6-week beginners guide.

Mindfulness

Practicing mindfulness is invaluable to managing stress. It enables you to observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them as good to bad. Living mindfully helps you clear your mind and brings you more in tune with what your body is doing. Personally, I turned to mindfulness to stress help deal with stress and have never looked back. Now, even under immense pressure, I don’t get stressed.

To take an initial step to become mindful, we recommend the following:

• Take 5-10 minutes in the morning when you wake up and at night before you go to sleep to practice deep breathing exercises. I found doing so in the shower was most effective when I first started
• Journal daily to help make sense of your feelings and thoughts. Having things written down can also help you create solutions to what is causing you to be stressed
• In our world of social media and everyone doing everything they can to promote an image of wealth, happiness and being cool, people are becoming more insular to talking about how they are really feeling. Find a friend or family member you can have a relationship with which you have no judgment. This will help you address stress. Also, listening to things other people are going through also helps you deal with your stress

If you’re interested in learning more about mindfulness, we recommend taking this course to get started.

Nutrition

Focus on keeping your blood sugars regulated by eating foods that help support your adrenal glands such as:

• Nuts
• Fatty fish such as salmon (if you don’t like fish try this fish oil supplement, we use it daily)
• Spinach and swiss chard
• Granola (we recommend this one)
• Dark chocolate (we recommend this one)
• Matcha green tea (we recommend this one)

In Summary

Stress is an incredibly dangerous state to be in, releasing hormones called cortisol and adrenaline which increase blood sugar, raises blood pressure, suppresses the immune system.

These hormones stop you sleeping, cause you to crave comfort foods full of sugar and fat, and cause your body to store the excess energy form this comfort food as belly fat.

Luckily there are some natural ways to combat stress including doing low-intensity exercise such as yoga, increasing mindfulness, eating well, and getting enough sleep.

We hope this article helps provide clarity on how stress impacts your body, prevents you from losing weight, and actually causes you to gain weight as well as some guidance on how to address stress naturally.

Leave a comment below if you enjoyed this article or have any questions you’d like answered!

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