Stress Reduction Could Help Prevent Weight Gain

Stress-reducing techniques and mindful eating may help combat weight gain without dieting, shows study.

UCSF researchers found that women in the study who experienced the greatest reduction in stress tended to have the most loss of deep belly fat.

Yoga for Stress
Tap into the powers of mind–body therapy called yoga and find out how you can use yoga for effective stress management.

To a greater degree than fat that lies just under the skin, this deep abdominal fat is associated with an elevated risk for developing heart disease or diabetes.

"You're training the mind to notice, but to not automatically react based on habitual patterns - to not reach for a candy bar in response to feeling anger, for example," said UCSF researcher Jennifer Daubenmier, PhD, from the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

"If you can first recognize what you are feeling before you act, you have a greater chance of making a wiser decision," she stated.

Body Mass Index
The BMI calculator helps you assess your weight indicating if it is normal or if you are underweight or overweight, based on your height.

The women who participated in the study were not on calorie-counting diets. Instead, 24 of the 47 chronically stressed, overweight and obese women were randomly assigned to mindfulness training and practice, and the other 23 served as a control group.

Although no diets were prescribed, all participants attended one session about the basics of healthy eating and exercise.

How to Lose Weight?
Slide show which explains obesity causes and tips on how to lose weight. Exercising before breakfast is most effective for weight loss.

The training included nine weekly sessions, each lasting 2 1/2 hours, during which the women learned stress reduction techniques and how to be more aware of their eating by recognizing bodily sensations - including hunger, fullness and taste satisfaction. At week six they attended an intensive seven-hour, silent meditation retreat.

Those who had greater improvements in listening to their bodies' cues, or greater reductions in stress or cortisol, experienced the greatest reductions in abdominal fat.

6 Tips For a Weight Loss Program
Losing weight would need some assistance and it is there in the form of six tips offered by experts from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Among the subset of obese women in the study, those who received the mindfulness training had significant reductions in cortisol after awakening and also maintained their total body weight, compared to women in the waitlist group, who had stable cortisol levels and continued to gain weight.

"In this study we were trying to cultivate people's ability to pay attention to their sensations of hunger, fullness and taste satisfaction as a guide for limiting how much they eat," Daubenmier explained.

"We tried to reduce eating in response to emotions or external cues that typically drive overeating behaviour," she added.

Daubenmier said the small study is preliminary and must be confirmed in ongoing, follow-up research.

The study has been published online in the Journal of Obesity.

Source-ANI