Two Minute Healthy Buzz Here is your question today: True or False If I say, You Need to Work on Your Stress Management, Your Eyes Go Cross and You Immediately Dismiss My Comment Hans Selye, the famous physiologist who coined the term “stress”, defined it this way: …the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it. The prominent psychologist Richard Lazarus offers a similar definition: …any event in which environmental demands, internal demands, or both tax or exceed the adaptive resources of an individual… I believe stress is one of the most important – yet most often ignored – factors driving the obesity epidemic. Studies show that stress makes it easy to gain weight, hard to lose weight, and if you do lose a few pounds stress makes it hard to maintain any weight loss success. This is one reason why some people just can’t seem to lose weight no matter how well they eat or how much they exercise. When stress is chronic, the hypothalamus signals the adrenal glands to release the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is normally released in a 24 hour cycle across the day. It rises in the morning to wake us up and then drops steadily across the day, so you feel tired at bedtime and can fall asleep. Chronic stress can not only increase average cortisol levels, but more importantly it disrupts the natural cortisol rhythm. It is this shifting of our normal 24 hour cortisol cycle that wreaks an immense amount of havoc on our body. Watch the Video: 
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