Stress and being overweight are linked. A stress study conducted by Techniker Krankenkasse (a German health insurance company) highlights this conclusion in 2016: 23% of Germans “frequently” feel stressed and 38% “sometimes” feel stressed. In other words: around 60% of German society is more or less stressed. These figures agree with those for obesity: according to the 13th food report by the German Nutrition Organization, “74.2% of men are overweight at the end of their working life, against 56.3 % women.[1]
We can of course not deduce a cause and effect link from these statistics. However, medicine observes that stress causes the production of cortisol, the stress hormone. The latter also has the function of waking us up in the morning. In dangerous situations, it produces rapidly available energy from the body’s own reserves, which allows us to act quickly. In such situations, other functions such as digestion are then relayed in the background.
Currently, cortisol has largely lost its primary mission: we no longer solve stressful situations with physical reactions. Thus we do not immediately consume cortisol and more particularly the energy that results from it. the released glucose remains in the blood and the body responds by secreting insulin. The latter in turn causes fat storage and prevents the body from consuming this fat.
Stress causes a other problem : we do not take the time to eat or eat too much, too fast and often unhealthy, too fatty or too sweet foods (you will find more information on the subject in our article on diet without sugar). However, these calorie bombs are particularly fatal in times of stress, because our metabolism believes that it needs a lot of energy quickly. This is just an illusion and we store all of this energy as fat.
Freeing yourself from stress not only helps your body prepare for the diet, it also helps your mind stick to the eating plan.