I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.

― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

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Can stress make you fat? Absolutely. Most people are stress eaters; they eat more and make poorer food choices when stressed, so when they learn to relax and include stress management in their self-care routines, they eat less and make better food choices.

Many people don’t understand that you need to relax in order to lose weight. They think that since relaxing activities, such as yoga, guided visualization, or meditation, don’t burn many calories, they are not effective methods for weight loss. Nothing could be further from the truth. Weight loss is much more complicated than calories in, calories out.

How Stress Causes Weight Gain

Stress depletes your adrenal glands and causes your body to go into survival mode. When this happens, your body produces cortisol and you store fat, especially around the middle. Stress causes you to crave sugar and other simple carbs which leads to weight gain. To emotionally cope with stress, you often reach for food when you’re not hungry and soon you find yourself caught in a vicious cycle of stress, exhaustion, and overeating.

Here are a few other ways stress causes you to gain weight.

Stress:

• makes your cells less sensitive to insulin which in turn can lead to diabetes and metabolic syndrome
• raises your blood sugar
• leads to insomnia which causes excess hunger and cravings for sweet and fatty foods
• causes hormone imbalances
• increases the rate you store fat