The ABC of Weight Loss

Weight Loss: Dealing With Stress!

Stress affects our life much more than we’d like to admit. When we are trying to make changes in our life, that same stress can begin to cause us to slip and to fall right back into our old habits.

While this is something that everyone has to deal with at some point, there are ways to manage your stress so that you can continue to make the best decisions for your health and for your life. Dealing with stress is not something we have necessarily been taught during our lives. But it is important to our health.

When our body is under stress:
• Your blood pressure can rise
• The heart rate can rise
• Blood vessels can dilate
• The pupils of the eyes can dilate
• Digestion slows
• You secrete cortisol (which has been linked to an increased amount of
belly fat) and epinephrine (which causes the fight or flight response)

Stress occurs when you are responding to some sort of event or action. This event is upsetting to you for some reason, so you react in a physical manner. Before the times of job stress, the body was designed to activate the fight or flight response in order to promote survival. But in these days, that stress response is actually doing more harm than good because it’s happening day in and day out.

But controlling your stress levels isn’t difficult once you realize how to get started. Stress is your response to something else happening, or an activator. This person or situation is something that happens outside of yourself, out of your control. What happens during this stressful event is completely out of your hands in most cases. But what IS in your hands is how you react to it.

For example, if you have a bad day at work because your boss yelled at you.

You could choose to:
A. Go home and eat ice cream.
B. Go for a walk after work to cool your emotions down.

Eating something may make you feel better (initially), but it is going to negatively affect your health, just as the stress is.

In the heat of the moment with stress, it can be difficult to remember that you can control the way you respond to stressful situations in your life, so here are some ways to keep your stress levels to a minimum:

• Try exercising at least thirty minutes a day
• Practice meditation
• Listen to soothing music as you drive home from work
• Stay in touch with friends and family
• Have a hobby that you do on a regular basis
• Get a pet
• Delegate work responsibilities that you don’t have to personally
complete
• Reduce your work hours
• Go on vacation regularly
• Turn off your electronic devices when you come home from work

Stress is like a drug in your system. When you don’t take care to manage it,
it can continue to build up and cause troubles. While a little stress is healthy, when it begins to take over your life, it’s time to make significant changes. Try to keep a journal or a log of the times when you feel stressed. Then list the things that you could do to handle this stress and then DO THEM. The more you practice managing your stress, the easier it will be to keep it under control.

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