Healthy Dieting

What we call ’suffering from stress‘ is in reality suffering from a potentially dangerous overload of our own bodies’ chemicals: those excessively high levels of relentless stress hormones that are so constantly released in our everyday lives, plus the other chemicals that follow. How this causes obesity is a relatively logical sequence of events. Since you are not physically fighting or fleeing during the normal course of your day, your body does not utilise the excess glucose in your blood, caused by the extra adrenaline. Now the question is what happens to all that superfluous sugar (glucose) in your blood?

Enters insulin. By now you know that you require insulin to make the glycogen (blood sugar) available as cellular energy. However, since you’ve probably been unduly stressed for years while at the same time indulging your food cravings on refined carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar, you’re very likely to be slightly (or highly!) insulin resistant. The result? The insulin cannot do its job properly and since high blood sugar levels are extremely dangerous, the body is forced to store that excess sugar as fat. Fat, as in obesity.

Furthermore, while you’re under stress you are probably eating mostly refined starches and sugars, combined with loads of fatty embellishments. That is, when you do eat. But the usual way of dealing with stress is to go without food for hours on end and then to overindulge on those refined carbohydrates when the unreasonable hunger strikes. Without realising it, many of us actually ‘fast’ while we’re under stress. We might think that we’re eating ‘too much’, but what we’re really doing is eating badly and irregularly. The pattern seems to be all or nothing’. In reality we survive on endless cigarettes, copious cups of sweetened coffee, the odd apple, tub of yoghurt, slice of pizza, packet of crisps or chocolate bar, simply because deep down we know we ’should be eating something’. But this kind of diet is not something that can sustain us. Least of all while we’re under pressure, when our bodies are literally decimating our nutrient reserves as an act of survival. This pattern (all or nothing to eat) can go on for weeks and in the process we can sustain what is known as ‘fasting injury’, caused by the release of another stress hormone. Strangely, few of us get thin while were under stress. We usually get fat. And then we get sick ….

Enters cortisol. This hormone – scientifically known as gluco-corticoids – through the intricate and compensatory manner in which it affects your physiology, may in the long run, cause even more damage to your body and health than adrenaline does. Long periods of raised levels of this hormone could cause loss of lean muscle tissue and loss of muscle tone. (You do remember that your heart is a muscle, don’t you?). Unsightly fat appears around your midriff, upper arms, neck, face and shoulders, not unlike the look of insulin resistance. That is the visible damage. What you don’t see-such as the chronic downward spiral of your immune system – could eventually become a serious threat to your health and reduce your quality of life considerably. That is the danger of undue, relentless stress and that is what cannot be stressed enough, if you’d pardon the pun. (This is also, of course, another nail in the coffin of those low-kilojoule, fasting diets. They damage your body severely and dangerously and often permanently!)

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