Stress Can Weigh on You, Literally
Eating a balanced, healthy diet and exercising regularly are the two prominent linchpins to any successful weight–loss plan. However, I suggest a third, often overlooked area of concentration be added to those efforts: stress management.
Not only can negative, stressful emotions lead to overeating or choosing unhealthy food, the body’s actual physical response to emotional or situational stress plays a starring role in metabolic health, even down to how and where we store fat.
Numerous scientific research studies have linked chronic, unmanaged stress levels with weight gain and obesity. Animal studies show that stress–induced secretion of cortisol, one of the hormones produced by the adrenal glands, increases abdominal fat. Similarly, a study involving postmenopausal women showed those women with high waist–to–hip ratios secreted more cortisol when exposed to a stressful activity and showed resistance to the hormone, an indicator of chronic stress, than lean women with low waist–to–hip ratios.
The connection between weight and stress is just one more good reason to take control of your stress levels. Chronic stress is known to compromise the immune system and has been directly linked to cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure. So, managing your stress healthfully could not only save your waistline; it could also save your life!
While I could probably write several volumes on various techniques for stress management, here I outline 5 simple steps that you should go through every night before you go to bed to help you come to grips with the unresolved stress and conflicts that have surfaced during the day. Committing yourself daily to such a stress–reducing regimen will give you inner strength and facilitate your weight loss efforts, and may even head off disease down the road.
Dr. Williams’ Five–Step Relaxation Exercise
1. Revisit the day’s events.
As you lie in bed, quickly relive the events of the day. If there were instances where you expressed any anger, bitterness, ill will, hatred, or other negative feelings (either verbally or even if you just had these types of thoughts) you need to visualize the situation in your mind, and picture yourself handling it in a positive manner. After doing this for several weeks, you will gradually begin to automatically handle real–life situations in a positive manner. Mentally “transforming” the negative attitudes and feelings will also allow only positive and constructive thoughts to flourish in your subconscious mind.
2. Practice forgiveness.
As you begin to re–examine and understand how you react to others, you’ll most likely need to work on forgiveness for both yourself and others. Regardless of how guilty you might feel for past actions, you must come to grips with those actions and forgive yourself. Move on knowing that you are making changes and will become more positive as a result of those past experiences.
Forgiving others begins with truth. You can’t keep the fact that someone hurt you a secret. Openly recognize that you’ve been hurt, experience the sadness, and above all relate this (honestly, but without bitterness) to the person who hurt you. Being totally honest is the only way to allow for forgiveness and start the healing process.
3. Give thanks.
Give thanks for all of the wonderful things in your life. If you can’t find anything to be thankful for, it’s only because it’s easier to feel sorry for yourself than it is to look for the “silver linings” in your life. If nothing else, you should feel extremely positive and thankful that you’re going through this process to make things better from this moment forward.
4. Eliminate physical stress.
After a few minutes of working through the above suggestions, it’s time to relax and get rid of the physical stresses that have accumulated throughout the day. You should already be lying flat on your back with a pillow to support your neck and head and with your hands at your sides. Beginning with your toes, first tense the muscles then allow them to relax completely. From there move to your feet, lower legs, thighs, et cetera, until you finish with the neck and head area. Don’t move onto the next body part until the part you are working on is totally relaxed.
You may find it difficult to truly relax on the first few tries, especially when you reach certain tension–filled areas, such as the neck or shoulders. But with practice, it will become easier and you may be able to use a quicker technique where you imagine you are lying in a warm stream of water that runs from your feet, up your legs, thighs, and so on. As you imagine the water moving up the length of your body, it should relax every muscle along the way.
5. Visualize the positive.
Once you have mastered the physical relaxation technique in step 4, it’s time to add some visualization and positive inputs to the process. First, imagine your entire body encompassed by a bright white light. Next, picture yourself as you would like to be. For example, you might see yourself as extremely happy and healthy enjoying a walk on a beautiful spring morning. Picture situations with loved ones or friends in the surroundings you would like to experience. The key is to use your imagination to not only “see” circumstances you would like to occur, but also to develop the ability to imagine how to touch, feel, smell, and even taste those situations. In other words, when you picture yourself in a positive situation imagine the inputs you’d be receiving from your other senses. The more detailed you can become, the more powerful a tool visualization will be.
You may have heard about imagery or visualization being used as a part of therapy for cancer treatment. Patients are taught to visualize their natural cancer–killing cells attacking and destroying the tumor. The same techniques can be used to help heal any type of physical or emotional illness.
Visualization may seem strange to some people, but we all use it every day in the form of imagination and day dreaming. With a little effort and practice you can now also use it as a potent tool that can improve your health and your life as a whole.
Take Care,
Dr. David Williams