| Subject: The Diva Speaks |
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D-Mons
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Date Posted: 13:21:52 07/19/05 Tue
You have to read this article about stress and belly fat.
I'm going home right now to throw out my Gut Buster, Ab Doer, Torso Tiger, Ab Rocker, Ab Shaper and my 6-Pack Abs video. It was taking up waaay too much room in my bedroom anyway, and my Bowflex is already big enough to hang all my laundry.
Wouldn't it be nice if a gym membership came with a laundry service. It could do everything that a home gym could do.
Maybe I'll find a Goodwill store with flabby patrons to donate them to.
-D
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Belly Fat May Be the Body's Way of Coping
WSJ - There's growing evidence that chronic stress can make you thick around the middle. Studies in rats and monkeys clearly show that a high-stress environment increases risk for accumulating abdominal fat, the type of fat linked with heart disease. And in human studies, stress appears to put normal-weight women at higher risk for excess belly fat.
While the evidence is strong that stress may contribute to weight problems, exactly why and how it happens isn't clear. Even so, a number of firms have used the link between stress and belly fat to tout pills that claim to lower stress hormones and help people lose weight. Researchers say there's no evidence such pills work. Claims by makers of pills such as CortiSlim and Relacore have recently drawn the ire of federal regulators.
To be sure, people gain weight because they consume more calories than they burn. But chronic stress may complicate the equation, causing fat to accumulate around the middle and prompting eaters to choose less-healthful foods.
This month, a report in the medical journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity looked at the link between stress and the consumption of comfort foods, finding that there may be a physiological reason people tend to binge on fatty and sugar-laden foods during times of stress. In a series of rat studies, researchers at University of California-San Francisco fed two groups of rats a diet of rat chow and sugar water. But one group of rats lived more stressful lives, spending short periods of time during the day in a confined space. Stress hormone levels were higher in the confined rats, and the stressed rats started to eat less healthy chow and gulp down more sugar water.
But what happened next was surprising. As the stressed-out rats started to accumulate more belly fat, their stress hormones went back down. The higher the belly fat, the lower the animal's stress hormones. That suggests that gaining belly fat may be the body's coping mechanism for turning off the stress response. In addition, the theory is that stress hormones may somehow turn on the brain's reward center, and the result is that during times of stress, certain foods actually taste better, making you eat more of them.
"It's why comfort food may reduce stress," says Mary Dallman, UCSF physiology professor and lead author of the rat studies. "It may be that you feel better if you put on belly fat if you're under conditions of chronic stress."
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