Can Stress Prevent Weight Loss?

Have you ever wondered if all those rough days at work or school are stopping you from losing weight? No matter what you do, the fat doesn’t seem to go away and now that’s stressing you out too. Maybe it’s the stress that’s holding back your weight loss.

Here’s how your stress can prevent weight loss, and what you can do about it to get the body of your dreams.

What is Stress?

In scientific terms, stress is any situation that disturbs the balanced relationship between an organism and its environment.

In English, this can mean stress from work, examinations, relationships, psychological stress, or any other thing that puts you off balance from where you are comfortable in life.

But you’re no stranger to stress.

How does Stress prevent Weight Loss?

Stress isn’t just something in your mind because I’m sure you can feel it all over your body. But how exactly is it affecting your body? And more importantly, how exactly does stress prevent weight loss in your body?

You can see this effect in two ways, either through hormones or through habits. Stress affects both.

Stress can cause the levels of hormones in your body to fluctuate. These hormones are responsible for the way your body functions, so if they are off balance this can prevent weight loss and even lead to weight gain. These hormones also influence the way you think and act.

This brings us to your habits. Because stress influences the way you think and act, it will promote behaviors that prevent your ability to lose weight.

We’ll talk about each next.

How Stress Hormones Prevent Weight Loss?

Several hormones are affected when you’re stressed out and quite a bit of them can stop you from losing weight.

1. Elevated Cortisol can prevent Weight Loss

Cortisol is also known as the stress hormone, which functions in order mobilize nutrients around the body. This is because your body wants to use these nutrients to get out of stressful situations as soon as possible.

Directly, this results in increased mobilization of glucose, amino acids and fats throughout the body. Before you think this fat mobilization is beneficial for fat loss, think again.

The excess glucose in the blood stimulates insulin secretion which acts on fat cells (more than other cells due to other hormones released) to store more energy as fat. Cortisol is notorious for causing fat to be stored centrally, which results in a bigger midsection.

Additionally, the mobilization of nutrients results in the breakdown of muscle proteins, leading to decreased muscle mass, thus negatively affecting workout and your metabolism on a whole.

Indirectly, cortisol decreases leptin secretion. This hormone is responsible for reducing hunger and reducing fat storage. Additionally, ghrelin, the hormone responsible for increasing hunger, is stimulated. Overall, this results in increased hunger and cravings.

2. Stress Elevates Catecholamine levels

Catecholamines are responsible for your fight or flight response. Their elevation can make you more irritable which can affect your decision making. I don’t need to explain how poor decisions can impact your weight loss.

These hormones also result in sodium and water retention and reduce gastrointestinal motility leading to constipation, which can prevent weight loss due to stress.

3. Elevated Growth Hormone prevents Weight Loss

Growth hormone promotes the growth of all tissues, which includes bodyfat. It usually decreases fat stores and increases fat utilization for energy. However, stress complicates this.

Growth hormone antagonizes the effect of insulin, reducing the uptake of glucose at muscle and liver cells. This can lead to insulin resistance. This effect is not seen at fat cells so insulin leads to more fat being stored and less fat being lost.

4. Insulin secretion may be Decreased

Stress can sometimes result in less insulin being secreted by the pancreas. This causes less glucose to be taken up by muscle and more to remain in the blood.

This leads to easy fatigue during workouts and also makes more glucose available for conversion into fat.

5. Sex Hormone production is Decreased

Stress can result in increased prolactin levels and decreased secretion of gonadotropin hormones, both of which lead to a reduced production of estrogen and testosterone. Even in women, small amounts of testosterone is necessary for normal function.

Testosterone promotes increased muscle mass as well as reduced bodyfat accumulation. Therefore, the reduced testosterone from stress can prevent weight loss.

6. Lower Thyroid Hormones prevent Weight Loss

Thyroid hormones generally control the rate of your metabolism. If thyroid hormones are decreased, you will be less active, easily fatigued and burn less calories on the whole. This prevents your ability to create the calorie deficit necessary for weight loss.

How Stress Habits Prevent Weight Loss?

The fluctuations in hormones can affect the way you think or act. However, the psychological effect of stress can also affect your habits which may be preventing you from losing weight.

1. Stress causes Cravings

I’m sure you’ve had those cravings before when you’re stressed out. You can’t seem to control your appetite, you’re hungry all the time and you’re always feeling to eat something that isn’t on your diet.

These stress cravings can cause you to consume more calories than you need and prevent weight loss.

2. Stress causes Poor Workouts

You’re irritable, tired and there’s enough on your mind already when you’re stressed. So even if you bother to workout you won’t be able to focus on training as hard as possible. This leads to reduced calories being burned, and as a result prevents you from losing weight.

3. Stress affects your Sleep

You probably know that stress leads to poor sleep quality and reduced sleep on the whole. This causes you to be more fatigued and less likely to burn as much calories as you can to burn that stubborn fat.

Reduced sleep has also been proven to be associated with increased eating. This increased calorie consumption comes partially due to the increased number of hours you are awake and able to eat. We all get those late night cravings.

Additionally, this increased eating is also associated with high carbohydrate and high fat foods. These foods are high in calories, which will only stall your attempts at weight loss.

Lastly, poor sleep may reduce your metabolism and cause you to burn less calories than you need to lose weight.

How to reduce Stress for Weight Loss?

It’s a difficult journey to reduce the amount of stress you have in your life. You may not be able to change your external environment but you can start with you.

Focus on eating healthier and exercising regularly. You don’t want to add any additional stress to your body through unhealthy choices. Learn to relax, breathe and unwind to escape the outside stresses and try to reduce your exposure to stressful situations whenever you can.

Losing weight is a difficult journey and you don’t need any obstacles holding you back, so find healthy ways to cope. Be patient, even if stress does prevent weight loss it doesn’t mean it’s impossible, so continue putting in the hard work. I’m rooting for you!

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