How Is Stress Affecting Your Weight?

In America we are storing fat more than ever and it is being fueled by one primary culprit.

In 1990 only 4 states had obesity rates over 10 percent — body mass index of 30+. Now, 26 years later, every state in America has an obesity rate of over 20 percent! If you live in Arkansas, West Virginia or Mississippi, that rate is sadly over 35 percent. What the hell happened?

This trend is nothing short of alarming, and the shocking part is our population has never been more into dieting and exercise at any other point in our history. People are desperate to lose weight. Entire TV shows are dedicated to how to eat healthy and create health-minded dishes at home. Books come out every week with special ways to lose weight and mobile apps are developed to keep your waistline slim. But nothing is working.

We have been researching this phenomena for over 20 years while working with thousands of clients in clinical guided hypnosis settings to figure out exactly what the underlying cause(s) are, and most importantly, what we can do to fix them.

My conclusion is that the No. 1 cause of obesity is stress. To understand this we need to understand how we are experiencing stress like never before and the close relationship it has to the hormone cortisol. Generally speaking, stress is “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.” To be more practical, stress is a nervous system response to external circumstances or objects that require some sort of change. It is the product of living off of the earth in an artificial environment. In short, everything we do and experience in our modern world causes various forms of stress.

When your cell phone goes off, that is a form of stress. When you are driving the car, that is stress. Watching the news causes stress. All day long we experience very mild forms of stress and quite often very acute intense levels of stress. Is this stress a big deal? And how does this relate to gaining weight?

Let’s go back a few thousand years. Our ancestors experienced life-and-death forms of stress that demanded a biological response. There were wild animals, wars and famine, but no cell phones, cars or cubicles. Our ancestors would experience a life-threatening stress that often meant that there would be no food available for some time. How did their body respond? By stimulating a strong impulse to eat as much food as possible so that they could store up fuel in the form of fat. It was a survival mechanism for the species, plain and simple. The hormone that causes fat storage in response to fight-or-flight stress is cortisol. Every time we experience any form of stress our cortisol levels spike and induce a craving to eat and store fat!

This hard wiring will take many, many generations to change except for those who can hack their genetic conditioning. Through professional one-on-one guided hypnosis it is possible to deactivate this wiring so that the stresses that are not life-threatening that occur many times a day do not trigger an eating response.

For many guided hypnosis clients this has been nothing short of a miracle. With some good coaching and guided hypnosis you will have a special inside track to weight loss that not many people know about! Weight loss, quitting smoking, e-cigs and hundreds of other bad habits: they all say that stress relief is the number one side effect of our unique self-hypnosis guided approach that helps them to win.