How Prolonged Stress Leads to Weight Gain

Interviewer: In your book you talk about a number of things that include stress. How does stress translate into weight gain? What is going on there that allows that to happen?

Dr. Kevin Dobrzynski: Stress and weight gain, so we talked the cortisol, how the body produces cortisol when  your under stress, and when your body is under stress for a long period of time, and first of all when you have high levels of cortisol the function is let's try to get blood sugar to the cells, so we can do what the body needs to do, whether it's to run, whether it's to think. But what happens is when you have these levels that are high all the time your body is constantly circulating sugar inside the blood. So your body either has to use it, and most of us as we know as Americans we're not using it, your body is going to store it. So your body goes through this period of storing, and one of the best storage forms of energy is fat.

So your body must store the fat. So that's a big problem  when that happens, and then if you have stressors that are there all the time, and you don't control them, the body is going to start to slow down to conserve energy. Now your metabolic rate is coming down.  

So at first your storing the fat, and now your metabolic rate is coming down, and so people with adrenal fatigue, people with thyroid hormone problems, one of the big problems they have are the symptom that they complain about most is the way they look, and the way they feel. So it's fatigue, and it's weight gain.