Ha! No wonder I went from a 29 inch waist to a 33.5 inch waist. Drinking beer/wine and injuring my ankle had nothing to do with it! Blame it all on working for the man (ignoring the inconvenient fact that I'm currently working for myself). Joking aside, I know if I manage to squeeze in some strenuous exercise into my day (bike, treadmill, even a long walk), I have more patience dealing with petty frustrations, vendors, clients, and co-workers.
WSJ.com - Stress and Your Waistline: Gaining Belly Fat May Be Body's Way of Coping:
There's growing evidence that chronic stress can make you thick around the middle. Studies in rats and monkeys clearly show that a high-stress environment increases risk for accumulating abdominal fat, the type of fat linked with heart disease. And in human studies, stress appears to put normal-weight women at higher risk for excess belly fat.
While the evidence is strong that stress may contribute to weight problems, exactly why and how it happens isn't clear.
...In a series of rat studies, researchers at University of California-San Francisco fed two groups of rats a diet of rat chow and sugar water. But one group of rats lived more stressful lives, spending short periods of time during the day in a confined space. Stress hormone levels were higher in the confined rats, and the stressed rats started to eat less healthy chow and gulp down more sugar water.But what happened next was surprising. As the stressed-out rats started to accumulate more belly fat, their stress hormones went back down. The higher the belly fat, the lower the animal's stress hormones. That suggests that gaining belly fat may be the body's coping mechanism for turning off the stress response. In addition, the theory is that stress hormones may somehow turn on the brain's reward center, and the result is that during times of stress, certain foods actually taste better, making you eat more of them....
Similar findings have been shown in monkey studies at Wake Forest University. In male and female monkeys fed foods that mimic the typical North American diet, the animals living in stressful situations were more likely to accumulate visceral fat -- that unhealthy fat that accumulates around organs and in the abdomen...
Last fall, a Yale University study reported that otherwise lean women with excess belly fat have an exaggerated response to the stress hormone cortisol. The research, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, looked at lean and overweight women who stored fat at the waist compared with those who stored fat at the hips -- and examined their stress responses over three consecutive days. The study found that the women with abdominal fat consistently secreted more cortisol in response to stressful lab tasks, compared to women with the hip fat.The mechanism that causes the body to accumulate abdominal fat is likely far more complicated, says Dr. Dallman. However, the stress-fat link does suggest that many of the nation's dieters are missing out on a key component of weight management if they aren't also trying to manage their stress. Exercise is an obvious way to manage stress, but even less strenuous options -- like yoga, meditation or massage may be useful in a weight-loss program.
