Stress, Cravings & Increased Fat %
First and fore-most ask yourself a few questions and be completely honest with yourself:
- Are you stressed right now?
- Have you been stressed today?
- Would you say you lead a stress driven lifestyle?
Now, a yes to any of the above spells problems, and you certainly need to read what’s below. If you answered all three with a yes honestly, then you certainly need to get reading, because you could be completely negating your physical efforts First and fore-most what is stress?
Types Of Stress
Well, we actually have 2 types of stress, one being non-specific stress, and another being specific stress.
Specific Stress
- Training Loads
- Volume Loading
- Intensity of Training
- Tapering
Non – Specific Stress
- Training Loads
- Volume Loading
- Intensity of Training
- Tapering
Dealing With Stress
So now you can kind of differentiate the two? Trust us, these two concurrently appearing in your life is not a good thing. Think of one being enough stress for your body to take in one day, and even though the general norm is seen for us to hit the gym after a s****y day at work and hit the bag, it’s really not the way to go.
Why you might ask? Because you’re basically loading your body with 2 maximal stress efforts in one day and that’s really not good for our body and its nervous system.
Now, the way in which we deal with stress affects the way in which our body digests our food intake. When stressed our body recruits the fight-or-flight personality and from that we release certain hormones which are designed to replenish our energy supplies during said response. Coming back to the point made earlier in reference to human beings have 2 types of stress, our bodies unfortunately cannot differentiate between the two and therefore will react exactly the same to whether your body initiates fight-or-flight mode because of financial troubles, or fighting for our lives.
Now our bodies are amazing and clearly incredibly intelligent for producing such hormones but unfortunately these hormones replenish our stores by increasing sugar cravings and often increasing our fat stores – this is not a good thing. Why does our body do this? One word “EVOLUTION”.
Stress & Weight Gain
Through years and years of evolution the human body has been put through numerous fight-or-flight scenarios, ones much more threatening than the average scenario today and thus in turn has developed the ability to do what’s must to ensure we have energy for a long period of time, in order to survive. Generations and generations ago this hormone would be released due to possibly someone threatening our town, or predators potentially hunting us, now its released when we have a stressful day at work, not quite the same is it?
So, now you’re starting to realise the effects of stress and how it can lead to weight gain, so what do we do? We avoid stress of course, and of course to avoid stress entirely is incredibly difficult, but to lower the volume in which we encounter it isn’t. So, lets manage our stress levels.
Stress management is not a hugely difficult activity to undergo, it just takes time, patience and the want of doing it. Start small, build up and before you know it you’ll be able to initiate that zone of ‘Zen’ in seconds. Having time to yourself is incredibly underrated, being at one with your thoughts in a quiet area, and taking a deep breath has shown to have huge effects on the levels of an individual’s stress. Coupled with this, sleep. Making sure you get 7-9 hours of deep sleep in a completely blacked out room lowers the chances of increased carvings and calorie intake in healthy individual’s .
Life is too short to be constantly stressed, take a step back, take a deep breath, close your eyes and think about something harmonic every day, and watch those stress levels drop.
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