The inability to effectively cope with stressful experiences or perceiving everyday life events as stressful and anxiety producing can lead to obesity, or can hinder one's efforts to lose weight.
Under any physical or psychological stress, the body produces a hormone called cortisol, which raises blood sugar levels to provide the energy needed to deal with the stressful event (the fight or flight response).
This, in turn, stimulates insulin release to help transport the sugar into the cells.
If stress continues over a long period, the blood sugar levels stay continuously higher, which can lead to insulin resistance and increased appetite.
What happens is that insulin is continuously transporting sugar into the cells, but at some point the cells stop responding to insulin, so the sugar cannot get into the cells.
As a result, more insulin is released in an attempt to get the sugar into the cells.
This creates an insulin-sugar imbalance: more insulin is present in the blood than sugar.
The body tries to restore the balance by increasing appetite, the carving and excess consumption of foods containing quickly absorbed carbohydrates, such as refined sugar and white flour products.
This increases blood sugar levels even further and leads to even more insulin release, more food consumption, more insulin resistance and so on and on.
The unused sugar then is delivered to the liver to be turned into fat and stored in fat cells, especially in those of the abdominal region (as a visceral fat), which is the most dangerous place in the body to store fat, since abdominal obesity is associated with heart disease, diabetes, stroke, immune dysfunction and other disorders.
The abdominal region is also the most favorite place for the body under stress to store fat, since abdominal fat takes longer to breakdown and metabolize, so it will last longer for survival purposes (since the body is afraid that food is scarce at times of stress - from the evolutionary point of view).
It has been found that in overweight people not under stress, fat is mostly stored in areas of the body other than the abdominal region, such as on the hips.
Excess cortisol also breaks down muscle tissue, which plays an important role in fat burning: less muscle mass in the body, less fat burning capacity.
Moreover, studies have shown that prolonged stress leads to the consumption of larger and less frequent meals.
This, in turn, slows metabolism and leads to more weight gain.
So, not only does the body under stress make one eat more, vigorously store as fat most of the calories it receives from food, but it also vigorously protects the fat from being burned by slowing down metabolism.
So, one ends up gaining more and more fat (even if one eats less), and having less and less energy as the stressful conditions and improper eating habits continue.
To prevent or reduce stress related weight gain with all its negative consequences, it's important to remove as many of the daily stressors as possible and properly deal with those that cannot be removed through relaxation techniques, exercise, as well as healthy, balanced, small and frequent meals, and appropriate nutritional and herbal supplements.