I love blaming my kids for things. I giggle every time I hear my wife tell our daughters about how painful labor was with them (especially since she had an epidural with both!). Kids can be wonderful scapegoats for things like psychotic breakdowns, bankruptcy, and buying the latest video game (for yourself). But now I have floundered into the greatest blame game in town…kids may be responsible for you getting fat! What is the number one thing that is associated with every parent? Not dirty diapers, not backtalk, not hormonal hurricanes, but…stress. And the number one cause of a majority of that stress is children. Now I love my kids with a passion that is unparalleled; however, that doesn’t remove the fact that raising kids in today’s world is full of anxiety and fear. If you are a parent and not stressed, I suggest an immediate checkup because you are obviously delusional. So how does this contribute to portliness? Waddle this way and find out.
The world is full of anxiety and fear. If you are a parent and not stressed, I suggest an immediate checkup because you are obviously delusional. So how does this contribute to portliness? Waddle this way and find out. When we are stressed, our bodies react in a manner to protect it from the stress. Remember, for thousands of years we were often a one course dinner for hungry saber toothed tiger. We had one goal…survive, so our body adapted to maximize the “fight or flight” response to outrun or outsmart the ravenous beast knocking at our cave’s door. This resulted in a cascade of hormones flooding our system when we freaked out, including adrenaline and cortisol. These combined to do good things, like supply energy to get the heck out of Dodge. But, just as Obamacare is full of unintended consequences, so is the stress adaptive response.
One of those consequences of excess cortisol is it turns on the fat storing enzymes and turns off the fat burning enzymes. The result is an accumulation of body blubber. As if this storage of body fat wasn’t bad enough, the fat that sticks tends to be belly fat. A significant amount of this is known as visceral fat, or the fat around the internal organs. You might be asking, “Who cares if there is fat around my spleen, I just want to look good in my bikini.” Unfortunately it is this type of fat that increases your risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cravings for Oreo Blizzards. Cortisol can also throw your blood sugars in a tizzy, which, in turn, can spike insulin.
Normally this is a good thing, normalizing sugars and all, but too much insulin can also favor fat storage. Adrenaline also pours into the body when we are stressed creating feelings of anxiety and nervousness. And what do many of us do when we feel anxious? Hide the doughnuts and Ding Dongs because when your stressed you”re “hangry” and not a speck of junk food is safe. I don’t have to tell you that most of that type of food is hermetically sealed to your thighs once ingested. When we are chronically stressed, (i.e. parenthood) we crave “comfort foods,” such as a bag of Cheesy Puffs or a tub of Rocky Road ice cream. These foods tend to be easy to find, highly processed, and high in fat, sugar, or salt. They also tend to be fatalicious on your bootylicious.
So you can see, stress can be a big player in the battle of the bulge and bailing your teenager out of the poky for sassing a police officer can definitely qualify as stressful. So next time your prepubescent germ carrier tells you that you are overweight, simple remind them it is their fault and then smack them with the cotton candy you were eating.
