Are You Too Stressed To Lose Weight?

Stress is one of the biggest blocks I see for people trying to lose weight and something people often over look, blaming the bread or avocados they’ve been eating instead!

Stress doesn’t prevent weight loss but it definitely makes it harder.For example it can;

1. Disrupt sleep
2. Impair our decision making ability
3. Drain your energy

So let’s look at exactly how each of these will make your weight loss more challenging.

1. When stress goes up, sleep quality goes down. When we are more tired as a result of this, we tend to look for ways to feel better and naturally reach for more carbohydrates to give us boost of energy to get through the day. We might look for sugary drinks or chocolate to help comfort us when we feel drained or give us a boost in energy. This therfore makes staying in a calorie deficit consistently, which is key for weight loss, much harder and unlikely.
2. When we are stressed, we activate the fight or flight part of our nervous system which can effect our ability to make decisions. When we are in this state we don’t make mindful and conscious decisions, but instead revert to habit. This is particularly damaging when trying to establish new healthy habits on a weight loss journey, as our default will probably be the habits that led to us being overweight in the first place!
3. Increased adrenaline levels in response to stress are often followed by a big adrenaline crash leaving us feeling exhausted. Increased cortisol in response to stress which is supposed to help us recover from the energy we use in a stress response will increase our appetite. An exhausted person is not going to want to go to the gym or increase their movement and an increase in appetite is going to make staying in a deficit much harder. Neither are ideal for weight loss!!

I hope you can see that stress can really play havoc with your weight loss attempts making your more tired, move less and more likely to drink or eat to deal with it!

With all my clients, I encourage and explore healthier ways of dealing with the stress such as practicing mindfulness, mediation, listening to podcasts, going for walks, yoga or anything where they will switch off for a bit each day. However whilst working towards this there will still be moments where they are tested, and they go to treat the stress they encounter with food and drink. This is one of the helpful strategies I give to them to help them when that situation arises and that you can start to apply if you can relate to this pattern of behaviour.

As soon as you feel stressed and in danger of turning to food for comfort, follow these three steps.

1. Remove yourself physically from close proximity to temptation (food and drink!) by getting out the kitchen or even out the house to go for a walk.

2. Think about how you will feel if you do decide to overeat or eat off plan. Will it actually make you feel better? Or will you feel disappointed in your decision and actually more stressed? Think about the mid and long term outcome not just the instant fix!

3. Start to reduce your stress levels to improve your decision making ability by doing something for 5 mins RIGHT NOW in the moment. This could be as simple as a walk outside, a quick call to your friend, laying down closing your eyes and slowly breathing for 5 mins or following a quick mediation ( there are loads of apps now to follow that do this including headspace!).

I hope you found this helpful and you can now see how stress might be the thing holding you back on your own weightless journey but also how you can start to get on top of it. If you would like more information on this or you’d like my help and support to get you to your goals then CLICK HERE. I know I can help :)