by James Lynne

Created on: August 15, 2008

"Stress Makes You Fat!" I glared at the title in bold print emblazoned across the face of the magazine in the airport bookstore. Stess makes you fat! Wanting something to blame for the extra pounds I am carrying around, I didn't require much arm twisting to buy the magazine. I took it off the shelf, shelled out a few dollars to the clerk, and headed to my flight gate, eager to discover a magical antidote to my added girth.

There is a definite link between body chemistry and the "flight or fight" response produced by stress in our lives. Think of the Caveman, for example, strolling through the tall grass at the edge of the tree line one-thousand years B.C. Suddenly, he's confronted with a hungry saber-toothed tiger on the trail. His choices are limited. He can run like the wind, to escape, or he can fight for his life. Either choice creates a chemical reaction in his body giving him resources to handle the stress of the moment.

Adrenalin automatically floods our caveman's blood stream, giving him the additional resources he needs for the stress of the moment. Adrenalin is a natural hormone produced within the human body for just such an occasion. During the fight-or-flight response, the adrenal gland pumps adrenalin into the blood stream, as well as cortisol, jump starting our heart, lungs, and vascular systems. The heart pumps harder, increasing blood pressure, opening airways in the lungs, and diverts blood flow from less critical body systems to these. This chemical reaction is designed to be of short duration, to give us that "edge" we need to survive encounters with saber-tooths and wooly mammoths. We were never intended to live in situations where the adrenalin reactions are ongoing and constant. The stressors of life, however, often do that to us.

After his brush with the tiger our caveman is exhausted. He finds a nice, cool, quiet cave in which to rest for a while. Ne needs to recover from the physical and emotional effects not only of his brush with death, but also from the chemical rush his body has experienced from adrenalin and cortisol. Unfortunately, in modern society, where we are often under continuous and ongoing stress we do not give our bodies the opportunity to settle back into normal mode. We work, eat, and live with ongoing stressors that continuously flood our bodies with these flight or fight chemicals. The reaction on the body is dynamic. Weight gain is one by product of this stress induced fight or flight reaction.

Although the effects

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