Bobby Wood's Food Storage System

Losing Belly Fat— How Stress Increases the Size of Your Belly

Sometimes the same health condition causes opposite effects.

It is generally believed that stress or increased anxiety eats away the flesh of your body. Anxiety, like fire, is fuelled by the body fat and consumes it while it burns.

  While this may be true, it is also true that stress makes us fat. It has been noted that people under stress often tend to eat more. Strangely enough, they probably find comfort in eating junk food such as hamburgers, pizzas and chocolates, which increase belly fat. Since they generally too stressed out to take any exercise, they cannot burn the fat they ingest and accumulate it in their abdomen. Some people drink lot of alcohol to drown their depression. They, thus, add lots of empty calories.

 Another reason  stressed people have fat belly is that they release high amounts of cortisol, a stress related hormone, into the blood stream especially during the periods of increased stress. It happens because our abdomen hosts receptors– molecular structures of protein– for cortisol that stimulate the storage of fat.

 It has been found that women with higher waist-to-hip ratio are more prone to release cortisol when they are under stress than those who have lower waist-to-hip ratio.

 [Waist-to-hip ratio, according to an article by J R Scott in About.com, is calculated by dividing your waist circumference by the  hip circumference. Waist-to-hip ratio also determines why some people have "apples" and "pears" in their lower bodies. An apple shaped lower body contains  the bulk of fat around the  mid-section, while a pear shaped lower body contains  it in  hip area.]

 Cortisol increases the stomach fat in another way too. It slows down the metabolism, which means that your digestive system does not convert the food you eat into energy. Ideally the digestive process breaks the food and sends its ingredients into blood stream. The undigested food or fat, obviously, stays in the stomach.

 Since you eat more food under stress you accumulate more calories, which add the fat in the stomach especially when they remain un-burnt.

If your metabolism is slow, it further compounds the problem caused by the increased intake of calories. The twin factors of increased cortisol and slow metabolism act as “double-whammy” in adding fat to the belly.

 Does your child have a potbelly?

 Don’t neglect the food your child eats and also do not put him under stress for whatever reason. Don’t make him work, play and study only to please you. Children under stress also turn to food for comfort.

 Most parents are too busy with their work to find time to guide their children about what they should or shouldn’t eat. So they consume lots of chocolates and junk food.

 It has also been found that stress disturbs the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal glands of the adolescent children. This, in turn, affects their behavioural responses, which result in over eating and increased belly fat.

You are welcome to learn more and download a FREE ebook “Insider Secrets For a Lean Body” by clicking on the link: How to Make Your Belly Slim, Flat and Sexy!

About the Author

I am an affiliate marketet and I do not recommend any product without having a thorough knowledge about it

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