Abdominal Fat and the Hormone Cortisol The risks of stress for people prone to abdominal fat retention
Posted on May 13, 2008
Throw in a little adrenalin and these useful, even essential, physical adjustments made it possible for our forebears to do things like battle marauding tigers on a moment’s notice, or scoop up their offspring and flee from raging wildfire.
But in the modern world, there’s little need to either fight or flee, yet the cortisol release remains functional in the species, only now, it’s activated in response to the stressors of modern society-bad traffic, malfunctioning machinery, domestic discord-rather than natural perils or challenges to survival.
There are some real downsides to this artifact of our rugged past. Research indicates that cortisol is also associated with abdominal fat production. And without the physical release demanded by, say, wrangling an enraged wildebeest, cortisol seems to end up accelerating abdominal fat production.
For virtually anyone, this can lead to higher cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels and elevated blood pressure, all factors for heart disease. But people who are genetically prone to holding their fat stores around the middle are especially susceptible, which makes this a bigger concern for these apple-shaped people than it is for those pear-shaped individuals who tend to carry their extra on the hips and thighs.
And there is other research that shows that abdominal fat retention - distinct from lower-body fat retention - causes specific, recognizable chemical changes in the body that can ultimately lead to lowered metabolism and symptomatic cravings for sweets.
We Cook The Food . . . You Lose The Weight!
In this way, abdominal fat retention can lead to ever more weight gain, putting overweight people with a predisposition to the apple shape at a much elevated risk for disease. Add a stressful lifestyle and excess cortisol production to those factors, and you have a time-tested recipe for a heart attack.
The majority of the patients I see have abdominal weight issues, especially the hurried executives, single parents, and those caring for an elderly, dependent parent, and there are many in that category here in Southwest Florida. While we’re not likely to be protecting our parents from wild animals anymore, there are so many stresses associated with that care-taker role, that people serving that function are likely to become all too familiar with their cortisol-induced symptoms, including that central weight gain.
Even so, the array of risk factors generated by abdominal fat ,abdominal fat retention can often be very successfully mitigated solely with a dietary approach.
original :Dr. Caroline J.Cederquist, M.D., weight loss program
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