How Stress is Impacting Your Weight
The following is adapted from Fear No Food by Dan LeMoine and Dr. Noel Abood.
To understand how and why stress makes us gain weight, we need to look at how certain hormones work in your body. I promise not to make this article too heavy with medical jargon and the science behind your body chemistry. I know you came here for help losing weight, not for a biochemistry lesson. But I do think it’s important that you understand some fundamentals so that you’ll understand why Dan and I believe in, and find success in, our approach to weight loss.
There are several hormones that impact your weight, but the three that we think are the most important are leptin, ghrelin, and cortisol.
Leptin and Ghrelin, Your Drive-in and Diner Hormones
Our fat cells aren’t exactly lazy. Among other things, they work hard to produce leptin, which is kind of interesting when you realize that the job of leptin is to prevent you from accumulating too much fat. It does that by signaling that full feeling you get from a meal. You start eating, your body checks in with your fat levels that say, “We need this much energy,” and when you hit that point in your food, leptin comes in and hangs the “closed for lunch” sign on the stomach (unless, of course, it’s dinner or breakfast…it has several signs).
Working in the opposite direction, ghrelin is a hormone your stomach produces that tells you it’s time to find an open diner. Ghrelin makes us feel hungry or like we want to eat. After experiencing a stressor, our stomach sends out the ghrelin alert to make you want to eat. Why? As you’ll soon see in the discussion on the liver, when you are stressed, your body primes itself to use a lot of energy. After a stressor, your stomach thinks you need to replenish your fuel levels.
Often ghrelin is what’s behind stress eating. Ever wonder why you don’t crave celery when you’re stressed? It’s crunchy and you can make it salty, so why not that over potato chips? That’s because ghrelin knows the best and quickest way to give you fuel is through fast-acting carbohydrates like sugar, flour, white rice, and starchy vegetables. But it also knows that the fast-acting part will be used up and something needs to follow it — what better chaser than fatty foods?
So leptin says, “No more food,” while ghrelin says, “More, please.” When life happens and stress piles up, those hormones go out of balance. Ghrelin puts your refrigerator on speed-dial, and leptin does its best to keep up. After leptin is over-ridden for a period of time, your body can begin to think it’s not a hormone you need to pay attention to, and you develop something called leptin resistance — you no longer receive those signals saying you’ve had enough. So you eat and eat some more, never feeling satisfied.
The thing is, leptin resistance has another cause, the third hormone we need to talk about: cortisol. And that requires a discussion about our livers.
Liver: Your Emotional Baggage Check-in Point
Your liver is a pretty amazing organ. It helps fight bacteria and viruses that can make you sick. It makes the majority of the stuff that’s necessary for your blood to clot. It produces bile that is needed to digest your food. And — perhaps one of the most important things your liver does — it removes toxins you may have ingested along with whatever you happened to eat or drink.
Similarly, when you breathe in pollution or absorb chemicals through your skin, your bloodstream will take those toxins to your liver to get rid of them. Most of the time your liver does a pretty good job of handling all of those responsibilities very well. However, when you experience stress, most of that stuff comes to a screeching halt.
It’s not that your liver quits working when you’re under stress. It just changes focus. When you experience fear, worry, or other negative emotions that are indicators of stress, your liver teams up with your adrenal glands — two little glands that sit atop each of your kidneys — to create part of your fight, flight, or freeze response. You may have heard of that before: it’s what happens inside your body when you experience something that causes fear or stress.
In short, the flight part of that stress response is when your body kicks everything into gear to help you escape a stressor. The liver starts producing glucose (sugar) and fats (in the form of cholesterol) to provide the fuel you need to run far and long. The adrenals, meanwhile, produce cortisol, which shuts down bodily functions that it deems are not needed during an emergency (like digestion). At the same time, cortisol amps up your energy levels by assisting that sugar to get into your bloodstream (among other processes we don’t need to go into now).
The fight, flight, or freeze response is the perfect thing to help you escape from wild tigers or bears. In fact, that’s why it’s there — to give you the energy to escape. But your body cannot tell the difference between a typical bad day and a wild tiger chasing after you.
When you are running late for work because your child has a fever and you need to make alternate day-care arrangements, you’re worrying about your kid and being late for work, but your body is fueling you to escape a grizzly bear. Then, after you drop your child off at the sitter and get stuck in a traffic jam, you’re stewing about and fretting about the inconvenience, but your body is giving you more fuel. And you can probably guess what happens when you get to work and your boss harangues you for being late and you have to deal with the myriad “emergencies” there, whether it’s a jammed printer or a client firing you.
Unfortunately, things don’t usually end there, do they? After work, there’s more traffic before you get home to realize, yet again, you can’t help your oldest one with his math homework because who understands that stuff anymore? The evening news upsets you, which you try to hide as you call your mom to see how her physical therapy is going. Next thing you know, you need to sit down to sort the mail and pay some bills — but ugh! The cat just threw up again! Does he intentionally aim for the carpet?
Your body simply can’t tell those tense moments of “the daily grind” from a grizzly bear ripping open your back door to find your secret stash of Reese’s Cups. So it keeps pumping out the energy to help you deal with a life-endangering threat…all day, every day. And our bodies were never meant to be in a constant state of stress.
We are designed to experience stress momentarily, then use up all that excess energy (sugar and cholesterol) to escape whatever is scaring us. Think about it — when you’re being chased by a wild animal, you need that fuel to run. So what happens when you’re under chronic stress and never get to run to the safety of the cave? Instead of burning off that sugar and cholesterol, you wind up with an excess of it that gets stored as fat somewhere in your body. And the belly, hips, and thighs are easy storage places.
But that’s only part one. Remember, your liver cannot multitask when it’s stressed. So its entire toxin-cleaning factory shuts down in order to deal with your stressors. And it does so at the same time that cortisol shuts down your digestive system (or at least slows it, because the last thing you need to do when you’re running away from a grizzly bear is to make a pit stop).
The consequences here are twofold: one, when you don’t properly digest your food, it ferments in your stomach and you don’t get the nutrients you need from it. That drains you and can cause malnourishment, fuzzy thinking, and feelings of weakness. Second, you now have toxins in your body that your liver can’t handle, and they need to be put somewhere. The good news is your blood stream knows exactly where to look: those handy storage places called fat cells. The more toxins in need of disposing, the more fat is made on your body. This fat is stuff your body is resistant to releasing because it doesn’t want those toxins just floating around where they can potentially do damage, so it is not easily burned off.
Now Brian’s situation probably makes more sense. His body started putting on fat thanks to the constant stress of exercise and training. Most likely, his stewing over and worrying about his social media image compounded the physical stress.
This may even make sense of the spare tire around our middle many of us find in middle age: all those years of working up the corporate ladder eventually take their toll. And do I even need to discuss parenting stress? Do any of us think we’ll survive teaching our teenagers to drive? Then when we do, do we ever stop worrying about them out there on the road? No wonder they give us both white hair and a muffin top!
But so far, I’ve only talked about chronic stress. Acute stress can be just as bad for us, mostly because we don’t let them go. A minor car accident where we walk away unharmed only lasts a few seconds, but we often revisit the fear as we tell everyone we know about it or reflect back on it as we drive past that spot again and again.
Being on the receiving end of a nasty comment from a grocery store clerk that makes us feel victimized somehow. It becomes something we hold onto when we vent to our partners and complain about it on Facebook, where your friends chime in and confirm you were being verbally attacked, and it never dies. Unless we can learn to let such instances roll off of us like water off a duck’s back — becoming something we shake off and forget about or something we process by going for a good run — they will often wind up manifesting as excess weight.
For more advice on fixing your metabolism, you can find Fear No Food on Amazon.
Dr. Noel Abood, DC, is a weight loss and lower lumbar decompression pioneer with more than thirty years in the field. After surviving a heart attack at the age of forty-nine, Dr. Abood developed a wellness approach focused on personalized nutrition and metabolic health. He lost thirty pounds and gained a new perspective on sustainable health that became the premise for his weight loss and wellness center, re:vitalize.
Dan LeMoine is an entrepreneur and co-founder of re:vitalize. After earning a bachelor’s degree in business management and two board certifications in nutrition, Dan and his wife, Danae, partnered with Dr. Abood to create the re:vitalize program. Dan is a former competitive rugby player who now enjoys running marathons and cycling. He and Dr. Abood are both based in Phoenix, Arizona.
