Will stress make me fat? How does stress impact on weight gain? Firstly, our body will get stressed in a calorie restricted situation. Because of the problem of fear. Our body has a death if we restrict calories, but our daily stress unmanaged, also has a huge impact on how our body responds to fat, and fat loss. The two stress hormones are adrenaline and cortisol.
Adrenaline gives the body the jolted needs to deal with immediate stress, such as a tiger attack, for example. And normally, the fuel of choice for adrenaline is fat. And how does this process work? adrenaline stimulates HSL hormone sensitive lipase. We To remember from the previous lecture releases the fatty acids from the cell so that it can float out of the cell and be burned as fuel in order for us to run away if we need to if we're going to be attacked by this tiger. However, constant stress and flooding adrenalin leads to adrenalin resistance.
So the fat cells do not hear the adrenaline. And the result is hormone sensitive lipase isn't triggered. So there's no fat burning happening, even with a stress situation. Plus, as often happens when we're stressed, we make poor food choices, often quick release chocolate bars or fast foods. And this is going to trigger insulin. And you know now, that incident also suppresses hormone sensitive lipase.
With quarters Every single time straight adrenaline is released when we stressed, cortisol is released with it. And cortisone cortisol role is to cool the inflammatory response that comes with adrenaline. Adrenaline is highly inflammatory. And we know if we were in an inflamed situation, we're often given cortisone to cool inflammation. So high stress and high adrenaline means high cortisol. And normally, if incident is low, cortisol will also trigger hormone sensitive lipase and therefore fat burning.
But large and regular quantities of cortisol that come with chronic stress increase leptin, and this leads to leptin resistance. And high cortisol also triggers the liver to release glycogen which of course increases the sugar in the blood. And this is because the body thinks you're going to need it. Because if you're going to be running away from a tiger, you're actually going to need a little jolt of sugar so your muscles can work. But the body cannot tell the difference from stress triggered by a tiger attack or stress from a demanding boss, for example. And you know that as soon as there is sugar in the blood, your incident levels are going to go up exacerbating insulin resistance.
And we know that as soon as there is sugar in the body, fat burning stops, because the body now has easy carbs to burn first. And again, because this insulin, hormone sensitive lipase is suppressed. So the result of stress in the body is high adrenaline and high cortisol shutdown effect. Burning an increase insulin. This leads to insulin resistance and birth, adrenaline and cortisol can only liberate fat in the absence of high insulin and insulin resistance and insulin resistance exacerbates the fat response when we stressed so it's a vicious cycle.