When people gain weight, they get upset with themselves which adds extra stress to the situation. Healthy eating and exercise are important factors to overall wellness including reducing our stress level but seemingly unexplained weight gain can be a sign from your body that it needs help. It is important to start by evaluating your lifestyle…AND be honest with yourself. Evaluate stress levels in all aspects of your life. The top three areas include: Work. Has something changed with your job? It may be a positive, such as a promotion, but the adjustment period has been more difficult than you thought it would be. You think you should be happy but instead you are just stressed. Home life. This can change on a dime! Everything is going well for months, then the roof starts leaking and you get an email your son is failing a class. Stress levels sky rocket immediately! Personal relationships. Is all well or is a fight from 2 months ago still weighing you down? Once you have had a chance to evaluate these aspects of your life, you can step back and see how elevated stress levels are affecting you…and causing even more stress to your body. Stress can lead to sleep disturbances. Are you prioritizing your sleep to make sure your body gets the rest it needs to restore itself each night? Why is this so important? If your body does not get the rest it needs to restore and repair itself, then additional stress will be put on your systems. Everything from your endocrine system, your blood sugar regulation and your digestive system will take a hit. Quality sleep is essential to our health.
 Stress can also affect our eating habits. When stress levels are high do you need some comfort? Hello,1/2 gallon of your favorite ice cream or maybe it is a bag of salty chips you crave. You sit on the couch and before you know it, it is gone and you really don’t feel much comfort and many times you feel a little sick. The truth is you were looking for emotional comfort and you were relying on food to help. It is a common trap we all fall into when we look to food for comfort and usually not from the best sources. Why is it so difficult to resist some foods? Well, the more processed foods we eat, the more we crave them. This is truly by design from the manufacturers. Their products are engineered to make them hyper-palatable. This keeps you craving them and purchasing them. They also want to keep their profit margins as high as possible so they focus on keeping costs down. Check out the ingredients list on your favorite processed food, I guarantee it includes poor quality oils (fats), ingredients from GMO crops, excessive amounts of sugar or salt and a good dose of chemicals and preservatives to keep the shelf life as long as possible. All of this works well for the manufacturer but leaves your body confused about how to process these ‘frankenfoods.’ Our body uses food as fuel. When the body doesn’t know what to do with a substance it can’t identify as food (i.e. processed foods), it simply stores it in your fat tissue. Our fat tissues have an unlimited amount of storage capabilities…hence weight gain! So if you feel like you can’t live without a particular processed food, it isn’t your fault, your taste buds have been hijacked. It will take effort to stop eating them but the reward is your health. 
 Too much exercise can put additional stress on your body. Believe it or not, if you are already experiencing stress, adding a stressful workout routine to your list could hurt you more than it helps. So many people say, ‘I am so stressed, I just want to sweat it out.' I get that sentiment and some days that workout routine is essential to clearing your head and feeling good. It also needs to be balanced with less stressful forms of exercise such as restorative yoga, walking and stretching so your body doesn’t go into stress overload. Why is all this true? How is it possible that we can contribute to our stress levels with not getting enough rest, our eating habits and our exercise routines? It goes back to our primitive selves, our ‘fight or flight’ protective response which is still deeply ingrained in each of us. Back in the time of cavemen, ‘fight or flight’ meant a tiger was chasing you. It was a SERIOUS life threatening event. Today, most of us operate on a daily basis at an elevated stress level. Have you ever felt ‘stressed’ because your phone is ringing, you hear a ding from your inbox and you are being asked a question? While yes, that is a lot going on, I think we need to reevaluate if it is worth our time to call it a stressful situation, more likely it was just overwhelming for a minute. Reframing the definition of stress is important because when we are continually in a ‘fight or flight’ mode, our adrenal glands are working overtime. They can’t handle this continued stress so they begin to release the hormone cortisol to try to help manage this stress. Cortisol is nicknamed the fat storage hormone…hence weight gain! 
 Not all stress is in our control, of course, but I think if you take the time to step back and evaluate where your sources of stress are coming from, you may be able to see what steps you can take to alleviate stress or where you need to work to reframe what is actually considered stressful. It isn’t easy but it is important to do the work so you can make adjustments to your lifestyle to relieve stress and improve your wellness because your health and happiness is always important!