WHY MANAGING STRESS IS IMPORTANT FOR FAT LOSS
When people think of fat loss the two main focus points tend to be training and nutrition.
And rightly so, as without a consistent strength training programme and a calorie deficit, the chances of fat loss occurring will be very minimal.
Whilst these two play a key part in your ability to lose fat, they can not be singled out as the only two things that your efforts should go towards.
Over the years, I’ve seen many cases of people training consistently and eating ‘healthy’ majority of the time but still struggling to lose body fat.
Why?
Because as soon as stress hits, an overindulgence of food & other poor habits tends to be the answer.
Here’s a few examples that you might even have noticed across your journey.
Because it’s been a high-stress day at work, people may often feel like they deserve a treat/day off. Which usually results in an evening binge of eating whatever they want, without being mindful of their choices.
A stressful situation has happened within their personal life, and the easiest way to ‘deal’ with it is by delving into distractions. So instead of still making time to exercise, they may spend the evening in the rabbit hole of social media.
As much as you may be committed to losing body fat, if you’re overlooking the way you react to stress, I can almost guarantee that your efforts will eventually feel wasted.
Learning to manage stress, doesn’t mean choosing to ignore the fact that stressful situations will occur in life. Rather being able to look at those situations objectively and choose how you want to respond and whether that response is actually helping or hindering you.
In doing so, you can quickly begin to identify the root cause of your lack of progress and start working on it, rather than beating yourself up for the results you’re not seeing.
It may seem like such a small factor, and I’m sure you might even be reading this, thinking surely it can’t make that much of a difference. But I can guarantee that in my experience of working with people, managing stress has been a game-changer not only in people’s results but also their level of happiness.
Outside of the external reactions to stress, it can also cause issues with your internal system. This makes fat loss seem 10x more difficult than it needs to be because rather than your body working with you, it’s working against you.
Experiencing long periods of stress can eventually cause disruptions in your sleep, meaning that getting a full night of quality sleep becomes a problem. Where before you may have been able to sleep for 7 - 9 hours undistracted, you might struggle to get 3 hours of unbroken sleep.
During the time in which you sleep, there are a lot of hormonal changes taking place that allow you to perform at your best both physically and mentally for the day ahead.
Two hormones especially that affect fat loss are Ghrelin and Leptin. Ghrelin is often referred to as the hunger hormone, as it helps to control your hunger. Whilst Leptin is related to feeling full.
Assuming you get a full night of quality sleep your body is able to stabilise these hormones, in a way that will allow you to make better choices for fat loss. Studies have shown that a lack of sleep increases the levels of Ghrelin in your body and decreases the level of Leptin.
No matter how much willpower you may have, trying to fight against the urges triggered by your hormones is a losing battle. Eventually, you can end up eating more than needed because of increased levels of Ghrelin and not feeling as full due to decreases in Leptin. Both of which are not conducive for someone with the goal of fat loss.
Hence, the importance of coming back to the root cause, stress. If every time a stressful situation occurs it limits your ability to get a good night’s sleep over a period of days, you will feel like you’re constantly hitting a brick wall.
The second point I want to bring your attention to is the internal stress on your body caused by dieting or long periods at a go. Whilst fat loss occurs when you are in a calorie deficit, the aim should not be to spend the rest of your life there.
Consuming less energy than your body needs for basic functioning over long periods of time, can actually do more harm than good when it comes to fat loss. Outside of losing fat, your body requires food for a number of different reasons from supporting your health, immune system and basic everyday functions.
Staying within the extreme end of a calorie deficit over a prolonged period can cause spikes in the hormone Cortisol. Increases in Cortisol have been shown to increase your appetite for sweet, high-fat foods and retain more body fat than necessary.
People often stay in a deficit too long for a number of reasons. It could be not understanding the effects of it, wanting results to happen straight away or even not being happy with the progress so far.
All of which are perfectly understandable reasons for wanting to continue dieting. However this is where it pays to be long game minded. Switching between phases of being in a deficit and then reverse dieting up to maintenance calories will actually help you continually make progress, rather than getting the results you want only to end up back at square one in 6 months time.
Whilst these two give context to how increased stress makes it harder for you to lose fat, the list of why poorly managed stress hinders fat loss goes on further than this.
Learning to better manage your stress both internal & external may just be the ‘magic-pill’ you’ve been looking for that will help you see sustainable results. If this is something fairly new to you it may be difficult and in some cases may require the help of a professional.
In the meantime, I have put together a set of questions to reflect on the next time you feel stressed.
Identify 5 positive things that will come as a result of this situation?
Are you reacting to your stress or choosing how to respond?
By choosing this response, how will you feel about yourself and your goals tomorrow?
Looking further down the line, if you continue to respond to stress in this way will it be helping or hindering your goals?
