Manage Stress to Manage Weight

While there are many factors that lead to weight gain and obesity, one of the most potent yet least observed is that of managing stress.

While eating too much of the wrong kinds of food coupled with leading a sedentary lifestyle go a long way to creating the weight gain, stress itself exacerbates the problem.

By reducing this factor in your lifestyle, you can better get to grips with the other factors to turn things around and not only halt the weight gain, but reverse it into a loss.

Damaging Stresses and Strains

Stress acts on the body by directly suppressing the digestive system. This leads to more undigested food entering and remaining in the colon.

It also means that less of the nutrients in the food we consume are used as energy units and more are converted directly into fats for storage. Most notably this becomes visceral fat, better known and loathed as "belly fat" because it tends to accumulate around the torso or more precisely, around the major organs of the abdomen.

Of all the areas that can be worked upon, stress is actually one of the easiest. That's because it takes little effort to reduce the amount of stress in our lives.

Tackling the Problem Step by Step

The obvious first step is to take ourselves out of situations which directly cause us stress in the first place, where possible. Next, if this cannot be avoided, such as in the work place, then it can still be dealt with by using relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, meditation and yoga, or self hypnosis.

It also helps to avoid drinking caffeine laden beverages (such as coffee, tea and some soft drinks or soda such as cola drinks and energy drinks). Or at least reduce them to a minimum and this also includes alcohol as these kinds of drinks both increase nervousness which compounds any stress we may be under.

Increased Activity Through Exercise Helps

Good old fashioned exercise itself is a great stress busting activity. That is because it channels the tension into muscle work where it is used to benefit the body rather than being left in limbo to work its destructive forces upon our health and fitness.

You can go swimming; running; cycling; you can enjoy going for long walks in the fresh air, etc. All of these activities raise our mood and give the anxiety a channel to be let out rather than kept in.

Therefore, as one of the most useful of all slimming tips, by keeping a lid on stress and following a healthy diet combined with some daily exercise, you really can go a long way to halting the process that leads to body mass gain. The health-giving benefits of staying calm and relaxed as much as possible are also linked with this and it's certainly something worth considering.

With this knowledge, you can work on reducing that excess to attain your ideal physical shape and size through nothing more than being mindful of your health and putting it all in to practice.

For more information on losing weight, this article here: "Excessive Weight Gain: How to Fight Back!" is a well written and detailed reference on the subject.

You can read it and learn what you might never have thought about before!

[BACK TO TOP]

Posted on Mon, Sep 20 2010 in Weight Loss | 0 Comments



Previous Post: Making Good Use of Nutrisystem Diet Benefits