Effects of Chronic Stress on Appetite and Body Weight

The effects of chronic stress influences your appetite and your body weight. In my post last Friday, Stress & Your Appetite  I wrote about stress and its impact on your appetite. Chronic stress enhances these effects. Slender For Life™ clients learn several stress reduction tools and self hypnosis so that they have tools for a life time that help them manage stress and lose weight. Let’s face it, we live in a stressful world. We have no control of the stressors, we do have control over how we respond. If you are ready to learn stress reduction techniques give me a call. I can help you reduce your stress and help you with your weight loss goals.

Effects of chronic stress on appetite and body weight

1. Animals exposed to chronic stress respond with significant elevations in ghrelin (an appetite stimulating gut hormone), which appears to increase preference for high fat, high sugar foods.
2. With chronic stress, there is chronic activation of the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis). This elicits release of endogenous opioids, which appear to be part of our defense mechanism against the detrimental effects of stress. Opioids feed back to decrease activity of the HPA axis in order to terminate and attenuate the stress response, providing a negative feedback control mechanism. At the same time, opioids stimulate intake of palatable foods, and palatable foods sustain opioid release. Therefore, in this way, consumption of palatable food serves to suppress stress-induced HPA axis activation. However, if the stress becomes chronic and eating becomes a learned coping behavior to sustain opioid release and attempt to suppress the HP A axis, then consumption of highly palatable food may essentially become ‘addictive’ (Adam et a1., 2007).
3. Chronic stress increases cortisol secretion, particularly in those who have high cortisol reactivity. Chronically elevated cortisol levels serve to: (1) favor visceral fat accumulation, and (2) sensitize the reward center of the brain to increase salience of pleasurable activities, such as highly palatable foods or drugs.

If you are finding it difficult to lose weight and to maintain your weight loss, chronic stress may be what’s made it so challenging. Discover how you can be calm and relaxed so that you can breathe and know that you are OK. Learn self hypnosis and the other stress reduction techniques that are available for you with Slender For Life™.

Read Stress & Your Appetite

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