You: Losing Weight by Michael F. Roizen MD & Mehmet C. Oz MD

Author:Michael F. Roizen, MD & Mehmet C. Oz, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

LIFESTYLE

73. Learn How Stress Makes You Fat

Along the intestinal freeway, the parking garage for fat that is your omentum looks like a stocking draped over a hanger (the stomach is the hanger), but changes depending on how many calories you’re storing. In a person with little omentum fat, your stomach looks as if it has nylons hanging off it—thin, permeable, with some webbing. But in a person with a lot of omentum fat, the hanger looks as if snow pants are hanging on it—the fat globules are so fat that there’s no netting or webbing whatsoever. (While cells can convert to fat in the liver, getting fatter is more a case of your existing cells growing. When you add body fat, you don’t get more fat cells, just more fat in each cell.) Genetics certainly helps dictate whether you’re going to have a big waist or a small one. But your lifestyle—in terms of stress—often plays a bigger role in deciding whether you’ll have large amounts of belly fat or not. Here’s how it works:

Historically, mankind has two types of stresses. The first kind is the immediate soil-your-loincloth stress (in other words, the dinner-seeking saber-toothed tiger is closing in fast). In that fight-or-flight scenario, your body produces the neurotransmitter norepinephrine to speed your heart rate, breathing, and 100-yard-dash time to the cave. When that happens, the last thing you’re thinking about is grilling up some tubers on the campfire, so your hunger levels are squashed. That’s because your body inhibits a chemical during periods of acute stress (it’s why exercise cuts appetite, because your body senses that you’re in acute stress). So high levels of stress work in favor of your waist: They take away your appetite and speed up your metabolism.

The second kind of stress that early man faced is the chronic struggle brought on by drought and famine. In contrast to the thirty or forty seconds they sweated over tiger fangs, our ancestors worried about survival all the time, and their bodies had to deal with chronic stress. When they faced famine, they sought out as many calories as they could, and their metabolism downshifted to help them conserve energy. The modern-day version of this problem is chronic stress, which makes us seek out calories and then downshifts our metabolism. Our bodies respond by storing the excess energy to call upon during periods where there may not be enough food. Those extra calories are stored in the omentum—our abdominal fat depot—to have on hand in case we are denied food. The liver, which is the relay station for energy circulation in the body, has immediate access to this omental fat, unlike the fat cluttering up the back of our thighs. When people are under stress, their bodies release high amounts of steroids into their bloodstream in the form of the hormone cortisol. In acute cases (the tiger or a car accident), steroids stick around briefly. But when you’re under chronic stress (the drought or the nagging task), your body needs to find a way to deal with those high levels of cortisol.

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