Stress - Emotional pounds how to eliminate them, without diet.

Stress and negative emotions are often responsible for the extra pounds. Here's how to eliminate them, without diet.

Chronic stress, anxiety, negative emotions lead to weight gain. Either because we eat too much, or because our body puts itself in a particular state that causes it to store calories, to face real or imagined dangers. Here are the mechanisms that explain how excess stress or poor management of emotions lead to overweight. And especially how we can remedy these emotional pounds without going through the diet box.

The hormone that inflates the belly

Produced by the adrenal glands, cortisol is the hormone of awakening and alerting. It is he who allows the resistance to the stresses of life. If your environment stresses you out or your adaptability is at half-mast, you produce too much cortisol.

Too much cortisol also means weight gain: the body switches to "danger, risk, starvation" mode and reserves energy. Cortisol changes the storage of sugar, reduces muscle mass, changes the storage of water and fluids in the body. It is directly related to the gain of fat mass in the abdomen: it increases waist circumference, especially in women.

The weight of comfort foods

Faced with emotions that are difficult to manage, we tend to compensate with food. Either by eating to fill up and no longer think or by using a comfort food, related to our childhood or to positive emotions or happy memories. Eating a delicacy or food that we particularly like allows you to temporarily compensate for the negative emotion and produce a feeling of well-being, especially via an elevation of serotonin in the brain, under the influence of sweetness.

While physiological hunger appears slowly, is felt rather in the belly (stomach that gurgles), occurs several hours after the last intake of food and disappears while eating, psychological hunger appears suddenly, is felt in the head (having water in the mouth), is independent of the last intake of food and persists despite satiety. While satisfying physiological hunger leads to well-being, eating in case of psychological hunger causes shame and guilt. Especially because an extra intake of food generates, as everyone knows, extra pounds.

In a study published in April 2015 in the scientific journal Appetite, eating comfort foods, tasty to manage an emotion or stress increases the body mass index (BMI), so the weight. But according to this study, and this is what is new, changing compensation habits can also reduce BMI in two years. A change of 1 point in the stress compensation score could predict, according to this study, a weight loss of about 4.5 kg over two years (the equivalent of a reduction in BMI of 1.76 points).

This is good news, especially for overweight young adults who are more at risk than others of gaining weight quickly according to the authors of this study.

Note also that a study published in March 2015 in theAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that parents who tend to want to control too much what their children eat (quantity, quality) can achieve the opposite effect because this attitude actually teaches their children to compensate for their negative emotions with comfort foods.

Losing weight without diet is possible

Diets cause stress to the body. If the origin of your overweight is related to stress and how you manage it, the diet could reinforce the problem more than it will solve it. In the long term at least. But the good news is that there is a way to control your emotions and stress to regulate food and weight gain.

It is possible to regain contact with his feelings of hunger, taste, satiety by working his attention on these body signals. By being more aware of one's emotions and signals, it is possible to reduce food intake and stop eating too much in response to stress.

This technique is called cardiac coherence. It is a form of rhythmic breathing that can be successfully applied to weight loss as shown in Dr. David O'Hare's program, which he developed in Lose weight by cardiac coherence. 

Cardiac coherence is an effective, non-drug weapon to combat excess cortisol. It acts on the perception of stress and therefore, indirectly, on the secretion of cortisol. It also acts directly by increasing the manufacture of DHEA, which changes the relationship between cortisol and DHEA, which have the same biochemical origin and are secreted in a "either one" or the other" mode. Reducing cortisol levels and stimulating the manufacture of DHEA are one of the physiological modes of action of cardiac coherence. Cardiac coherence synchronizes the rhythm of the heart and that of breathing, it is obtained thanks to a slow, ample and regular breathing of 6 cycles per minute. Practiced 5 minutes in a row, this breathing in frequency 6 reduces the level of stress.

A very interesting British study published in 2001 compared the waist circumference of one group of people who practiced cardiac coherence exercises with that of another group who had not undergone any particular intervention. As a result, the abdominal perimeter of the group trained in cardiac coherence decreased significantly and durally since this reduction in fat mass was still maintained six months after the exercises, without further intervention.

However, it is the abdominal perimeter, and not the weight on the scale, that is the factor to monitor for health, especially cardiovascular.

In 2011, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco evaluated the effects of a stress management and self-awareness program on obese women.

KEEP READING:

What foods to consume against stress?

Water Fasting: Benefits and Dangers

Tips on how to protect yourself from the COVID-19 Delta variant while traveling

Post-Pandemic Anxiety Is a Real Issue—Here’s How to Get More Comfortable During Re-Openings

For 9 weeks 24 women (out of 47 followed) followed a program to help them manage their stress and take better control of their sensations related to food: feeling hungry, taste pleasure and satiety. To this method of "mindfulness" were added 30 minutes of meditation every day. No diet was asked for the 47 participants, although all of them took a course on the benefits of a balanced diet and physical activity.

Results: Women who had the best awareness of their body and appetite-related signals saw a greater decrease in their stress levels, cortisol levels and abdominal fat.

your health