If it seems that your progress has hit a wall even though you’ve been eating right and training adequately in a consistent manner for a long period of time, you’re probably too stressed out and it’s time to address this invisible obstacle that can sabotage your fat loss efforts.
Stress wreaks havoc on your body and mind and makes everything more difficult both physiologically and mentally – when your stress hormones fail to drop down for extended periods, you’re experiencing what’s called chronic stress, an unpleasant state of being that makes eating the right foods and getting enough good quality sleep a tough, on-going struggle. Chronic stress weakens our mental power and focus and makes it easy to succumb to food cravings and toxic thoughts that diminish our willpower even further.
On the other side, stress can prevent fat loss and actually encourage fat gain by deregulating the functioning of key hunger hormones in the body, ghrelin and leptin. Leptin helps to control your appetite, while ghrelin gets released anytime you’re hungry.
When you’re overly stressed, leptin levels will drop and ghrelin levels will dramatically increase, making you hungrier. In addition, the chronic elevation of cortisol levels caused by excessive stress negatively affects the receptors for both insulin and leptin, which makes it harder for the body to read the signals of those hormones, thus keeping fat trapped in the cells and making you hungry all the time.
All in all, finding effective strategies for dealing with stress is a crucial step to improving both your physical and mental health, and it’s also one of the cornerstones of developing an impressive physique.
If it seems that your progress has hit a wall even though you’ve been eating right and training adequately in a consistent manner for a long period of time, you’re probably too stressed out and it’s time to address this invisible obstacle that can sabotage your fat loss efforts.
Stress wreaks havoc on your body and mind and makes everything more difficult both physiologically and mentally – when your stress hormones fail to
drop down for extended periods, you’re experiencing what’s called chronic stress, an unpleasant state of being that makes eating the right foods and getting enough good quality sleep a tough, on-going struggle. Chronic stress weakens our mental power and focus and makes it easy to succumb to food cravings and toxic thoughts that diminish our willpower even further.
On the other side, stress can prevent fat loss and actually encourage fat gain by deregulating the functioning of key hunger hormones in the body, ghrelin and leptin. Leptin helps to control your appetite, while ghrelin gets released anytime you’re hungry.
When you’re overly stressed, leptin levels will drop and ghrelin levels will dramatically increase, making you hungrier. In addition, the chronic elevation of cortisol levels caused by excessive stress negatively affects the receptors for both insulin and leptin, which makes it harder for the body to read the signals of those hormones, thus keeping fat trapped in the cells and making you hungry all the time.
All in all, finding effective strategies for dealing with stress is a crucial step to improving both your physical and mental health, and it’s also one of the cornerstones of developing an impressive physique.