Linda Drummond wrote in the Sunday Mail on 6th June, “ If your excess weight won’t budge, getting your anxiety levels under control could help.” It makes sense to me.
We were never meant to be in constant stress. In the animal kingdom there is threat to life and limb when animals are stalked or do the stalking, or fight for mating rights. But these threats come and go fairly quickly. Once an animal escapes, or the threat passes, or the challenge is won or lost, there is a return to the non-stressed state.
Human beings are very clever. It seem we have worked out how to remain in a stressed state non-stop, day in day out, for days, weeks, months or even years. It’s either the job we don’t like or the in-laws we can’t get on with, or the promotion we missed, or the mortgage payments, or noisy neighbours, or a partner who doesn’t understand us, or teenage kids that rule the roost, or something.
We could fight the physical attackers but our stresses like worry or fear are emotional so we can’t resolve them physically. Many of us try to keep busy or to run away from the problems, but that doesn’t resolve things either. And some of us are just frozen, unable to fight or run, just get stuck.
Our body was not designed to withstand continuous stress. “One of the things that stress does is release stress hormones cortisol and neuropeptide Y,” says Dr Sainsbury-Salis. “Cortisol acts directly on your fat deposits, causing you to gain fat around the belly.” Cortisol receptors in your abdomen are ready and waiting to store fat in case of famine or another life-threatening situation.
And further, “Cortisol gives you a higher preference for addictive behaviours and makes high-fat and high-sugar foods much more attractive.” Dr Sainsbury-Salis says. And further still, for many, stress hormones trigger the hypothalamus in the brain to increase hunger so they want to eat more.
New research at Garvan Institute found neuropeptide Y “causes the birth of new fat cells (that’s a new admission!), increases new blood vessels to the cells, and generally helps promote their growth and development,” says Dr Sainsbury-Salis. But this happened only when animals in experiments ate high-fat, high-sugar diets.
Seems there is no way to win in the weight struggle. Prolonged stress increases appetite for the wrong reason, for the wrong foods, expands the belly readily, and makes more fat cells, escalating threats to health even more – which adds further stress. It’s now a cycle that loops round and round.
What’s the solution? Is there one?
The problem started with prolonged stress so that’s where you look to find the solution. Stress is now a habitual pattern. Part of the problem is that we actually become addicted to stress hormones and being in a constant state of panic. And if things get quiet we panic that it can’t last and set off stress anyway. All that stress slows down your metabolism.
So reducing stress and increasing metabolism can reverse the problem. How do you do that? What are your options? Well, inaction is also part of the problem. Stress hormones are designed to give extra energy for life saving action. If you don’t take action and use up the hormones you can’t relax. Don’t sit on it. Start moving your body. Get walking. Go to the gym. Take up sport. Do something physical, regularly, daily. This will reverse the stress signals and produce feel good hormones instead.
Straight after physical activity it becomes much easier to relax, so consciously add deep breathing while you stretch and elongate muscles to further reverse stress signals. Your brain is wired to recognize the cluster of stress hormones, plus tension in specific muscles, plus shallow breathing, as one unit. Move to get energy flowing, use up the hormones with exercise, now breathe deeper and stretch muscles. Your brain takes each as a signal to reverse the panic, to allow the body to relax more and more.
And use Emotional Stress Release, a Kinesiology technique, to reverse blood flow in the brain. When distressed blood is redirected to survival programs and withdrawn from executive brain so you can’t think through or create a solution to your problem. More on that to follow.
Cheers
Anna McRobert
anna@annamcrobert.com.au