14 DAY TRIAL // Stress has been shown to be well able to wreak havoc on your average Joe or Jane's psychological wellbeing. Oddly enough, recent evidence indicates that stress can also have a negative impact on one's waistline.
In a nutshell, a paper in the journal Biological Psychiatry explains that, according to the outcome of recent investigations, stressful events act on a woman's body by slowing metabolism just enough to encourage weight gain.
This stress-related weight gain is even more likely to occur if and when the woman in question chooses to eat a high-fat meal shortly after going through a rather stressful experience, the scientists behind this research project detail.
Information shared with the public says that, while investigating how stress influences weight gain in women, Psychiatry and Psychology Professor Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, together with fellow researchers, carried out a series of experiments.
They fed several volunteers a high-fat meal, i.e. one that amounted to 930 calories and comprised 60 grams of fat, and then closely monitored their metabolic rater looking to determine how the women's body dealt with the caloric intake, EurekAlert informs.
The researchers found that women who admitted to going through one or more stressful events the day prior to being offered their 930-calorie high-fat meal all had a slower metabolic rate. Specifically, they all burned 104 fewer calories.
Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, who now works with The Ohio State University in the US, explained that, in time, these 104 calories that stressed women failed to burn after enjoying their meal were likely to translate into a yearly weight gain of 11 pounds (5 kilograms).
More so given the fact that, as revealed by blood tests, the stressed women whose metabolic rate these researchers got to analyze also had higher levels of insulin, a hormone shown to encourage fat storage and slow down the process of turning stored fat into fuel.
“This means that, over time, stressors could lead to weight gain,” study lead author Jan Kiecolt-Glaser comments on the outcome of this series of experiments involving as many as 58 women whose average age was 53.
Furthermore, “We know from other data that we're more likely to eat the wrong foods when we're stressed, and our data say that when we eat the wrong foods, weight gain becomes more likely because we are burning fewer calories.”
“We know we can't always avoid stressors in our life, but one thing we can do to prepare for that is to have healthy food choices in our refrigerators and cabinets so that when those stressors come up, we can reach for something healthy rather than going to a very convenient but high-fat choice,” adds study co-author Martha Belury.