This makes it really hard to eat well, because when you’re stressed, you’re craving the comfort food, the high fat, high sugar, high salt, depending on your temperament.
And that is, that means with repeated bouts of stress, you’re just going to be gaining weight and particularly in the intra abdominal area. That’s what we’ve seen.
And now we’ve seen it in people in many steps, for about 10 years I studied this.
And the question was, is what’s happening in people the same thing that’s happening in mice?
If you stress them out and you give them Oreos, the mice develop binge eating, they get really compulsive and they get this, you know, terrible metabolic health profile, metabolic syndrome, where they’re, they’re around, you know, they’re, they’re belly fat, basically expands like a cushion.
And that’s because that’s this really good immediate source of energy during stress. So we’re like, we’re really well wired to, if our body thinks we’re under chronic stress, we’re going to store stress fat or abdominal fat so we can just mobilize that in a second.
And then the second question we’ve asked is, can you reverse that with different interventions? Can you block the compulsive eating?
The podcast excerpt is here: The Link Between Stress and Weight Gain | 1min snip from Huberman Lab
The full episode is here: Dr. Elissa Epel: Control Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging
Go one level up : Nutrition MOC You may also be interested in: Tools to Shift from Threatened to Challenge Response in Stress Management