Isn’t gaining weight just a matter of not burning the calories you take in? Where does being over stressed link into this?
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Cortisol, the chemical your body releases when subject to stress (not fight or flight, that would be adrenalin, which is short term) causes a massive spike in hunger to replace resources it believes you’re using to overcome the stressful event. Basically, your body is saying, I need all available resources to sustain life – go get ’em. You might think you can win a fight like that with willpower, but it’s unlikely over the long term given how deeply wired that response is and how strongly it was conserved via evolution.
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Stress raises cortisol. Cortisol increases body fat. Relacore helps reduce cortisol. You need Relacore.
It is just a matter of calories. I don’t purport to know whether the driving force is biological or psychological, but the conclusion is the same – people tend to “stress eat” in response to stress. Effectively consuming excess calories relative to their normal diet, and thus gaining weight.
How does anxiety sometimes cause weight loss? While different than stress, it’s a similar situation, no? I had panic attacks a few years back and before I got them under control I dropped 25 points out of nowhere.
In addition to the solid Cortisol and dopamine answers, one [famous study decided that self-control is a limited resource](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/the-chocolate-and-radish-experiment-that-birthed-the-modern-conception-of-willpower/255544/). When you are in stressful situations, handling them often requires self-control, like if your boss treats you unjustly and you have to take it. If you’ve used up your limited self-control on stressful situations, you have less to apply to eating properly.
Our bodies evolved to confront physical challenges, not so much social or mental ones. So when you get stressed consistently, your body assumes you are under physical challenge and assumes that you are expending lots of energy to do so. Therefore, it assumes you need more food, and sends signals that you should eat more. So even if you are stressed from school or a social pressure, you get hungry the same way you would if you had to climb a mountain.
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