(Click here to take the Stress Hormone Questionnaire to find out if stress might be making it hard for you to lose weight and be healthy!)
Why does it seem impossible for some people to lose weight?!
Your brain measures how many calories you burn each day and then gives you an appetite to match so that you won’t overeat or under-eat. And, your brain only craves healthy foods, it never craves harmful foods.
Yet so many of us overeat and regularly crave fast energy junk foods (sugar, processed carbs).
How could these statements all be true simultaneously?
Well, there is one instance in life where sugar and desserts actually are a health food (or at least a survival food)… when you are literally running from a tiger to save your life! Sugar and processed carbs would help you run faster, improving your odds of avoiding immanent death. But….in modern life, absent literal tigers, eating sugar causes long term body damage and weight gain.
The same is true for overeating. The increased appetite (and subsequently taking in extra calories) is in preparation for running from tomorrow’s tiger.
So why would we crave junk food when no literal tigers exist in modern life?
Because of a huge internal misunderstanding due to a brain imbalance. Namely, we all tend to produce too many stress hormones for any given life circumstance.
For some reason, (a reason I’ve discovered and the topic of my upcoming book, Raised by Reptiles), modern humans tend to perceive non-dangerous daily happenings as if they were life threatening.
When your boss shows signs of frustration causing your brain to have thoughts of getting fired, your body likely, but abnormally, acts as if this is a life threatening circumstance and produces high levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones immediately prepare you to run when the literal tiger shows up.
But the tiger never shows up (even if you get fired, there is no tiger, not even a tiger equivalent because you aren’t at risk of actually dying, nor do you need to physically run away). So we send the extra calories we ate while under stress at work into fat storage.
The more stress hormones we release, the more we crave sugar and the more calories we eat.
If your boss suddenly becomes a permanent angel, then your appetite will reduce until your calorie intake has balanced with your actual energy expenditure. But even if your boss is nice, the mail will be late, the car will break down, the computer will freeze, the in-laws will visit, the dog will misbehave, the kids will cry, the President will tweet, the weather will change, or your sports team will lose.
None of these examples are life threatening, none of them warrant releasing stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Yet, modern humans tend to erroneously release them in chronically high levels under these undesirable but non-life-threatening situations. When we do, our appetite will increase, we will crave “junk foods,” and we will eat too much whether we know it or not. Even two extra bites per meal, over the course of a year can add up to several pounds of extra weight.
Conversely, when we are not in danger of a tiger chasing us, and when we are not releasing stress hormones, we will not crave sweets and refined carbs, not in the least.
The degree to which you are craving refined carbs like breads and pastas, foods with sugars, and other sweets, is the degree to which your body is misinterpreting the happenings of your life as if there was a literal tiger about to pounce on you. Or, you could say, it is a direct measure of the level of stress in your life.
So I have to lower my stress levels in order to lose weight?
Yes. Otherwise, even if you lose weight with lots of hard work by forcefully starving yourself, you will just gain it back once you try to eat normally again, even if you only eat “healthy” foods.
What if I can’t lower my stress, can I just exercise to burn the extra calories I’m eating?
No, your body will account for the calories burned during the exercise and just increase your appetite even more to match the exercise output together with the perceived tiger threat.
But I know someone who loses weight when they exercise and gains weight when they don’t go to the gym regularly, doesn’t that disprove this theory?
No. In these cases, the exercise has become a way for the person to “de-stress” and calm their stress hormones down. So it’s not the calories they are burning at the gym, but the effect it has on their perceived stress levels when they aren’t at the gym.
So from this perspective you could do almost anything, like say, jigsaw puzzles instead of going to the gym, and have a weight loss effect, if the puzzles were allowing you to reduce your stress hormones (unlikely but possible if you really enjoy puzzles).
But for most people, especially if they don’t enjoy it, exercise won’t reduce their stress, it actually might increase it, and therefore increase their weight over time! Also, if the exercise is too strenuous (which is true for many gym goers), the exercise will increase their levels of stress hormones!
So why do we produce such high levels of stress hormones for such relatively small levels of stress?
There is a biological reason why our modern brains are producing stress hormones at such high levels when there is nothing actually dangerous happening to us. We used to not be this way. All current-day hunter-gatherer’s known are very thin, obesity being non-existent. A recent study found that it isn’t because they exercise more than modern people. So it has to be either the different types of foods we eat that is causing us to be overweight, or it has to do with stress levels leading us to eat more quantity generally, no matter the type of food. In my opinion, it is the perceived stress moderns have that leads us to both eat too much and crave junk food, so a bit of both.
Essentially, the part of the modern human brain that looks out for future danger and assesses severity of present danger (the reptile brain) is over-developed. And, simultaneously, the part of our brains that calms us down after a real or perceived dangerous situation (the mammal brain), is under-developed.
So, from this perspective, the true underlying cause of obesity is an overactive stress response in the part of our brains called the “reptile brain,” combined with an underactive self-soothing mechanism in the part of our brains called the “mammal brain.”
Click here to read my next article on the Baby Steps for lowering your stress hormones and healing your brain by calming your “reptile brain” and strengthening your self soothing “mammal brain.”
Yours in health,
John B. Campise Wellness Consulting
Holistic, Chiropractic, Light therapy, Hyperbaric therapy
(559) 930-1034
1709 W. Barstow Avenue
Fresno, CA 93711
ENGAGE
*Subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=johnbcampise
*Support me: https://www.patreon.com/johncampise
CONNECT
*Twitter: https://twitter.com/campisefresno
*Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/John-B-Campise-Wellness-Consulting-436906703059310/
*Website: https://campise-chiropractor-fresno.com/
