Stress & Weight Loss | How to Reduce Stress to Lose Weight [Infographic]

When it comes to losing weight, there are a lot of things that can impede your ability to achieve weight loss. And one of the biggest culprits to blocking your ability to losing weight is high stress levels. High-stress levels actually sabotage your weight loss efforts.

How Does Stress Affect Your Ability to Lose Weight?

• Many people eat when they are under stress. We turn to food for comfort. And these “comfort foods” usually don’t pack a nutritional punch. Instead, they offer no nutritional value but a lot of empty calories that help us gain weight instead of losing weight.
• As a reaction to high-stress levels, your body produces the hormone cortisol. This hormone has been linked with the buildup of abdominal fat which certainly is not going to be helpful when you are trying to lose weight.
• This excess of cortisol also interferes with your metabolic processes such as slowing your metabolism. A slower metabolism means your body can’t burn calories as efficiently as it would at lower stress levels.

Below is an infographic that depicts causes of stress as well as ways you can alleviate stress so you can keep your weight loss efforts on track.