Stress And Weight Gain

Speaker: How does stress contribute to weight gain?

Dr. William McCarthy: There are number of factors with stress and relationship to weight gain.

First of all people who are stress tend to eat. We get comfort from food. A food is available. We have learnt from early age on that we're order ourselves when we are and by eating. We also learned when we are stress, we start to eat, we grab for backup chips or soda and so stress tend to cause people to continually gain weight. Stress also can interfere with certain hormones it can actually increase for example cortisol levels which intern increase fat deposition.

Stress can also interfere with sleep and multiple medical studies that have now shown the importance of a good night sleep and losing the weight and people who don't get enough sleep they tend to gain weight. Also the medications that we use to treat stress quiet frequently will cause weight gain. And so it's a vicious cycle, we have stress, we have eating, we start medications and the person continues to gain more. And then there are certain eating syndromes that are associated with stress, we have syndromes such as night time eating disorder where person will actually get up in the middle of the night and grab something to eat, because they have a sleep disturbance that probably has it origin in stress. We have bench eating disorders. People in order to relive stress will eat an amount of calories and as very short time. We also have conditions such as bulimia which may also restress related.

So there are number of factors restress and weight gain.


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