Lose your ‘stress stone’
In the first of a four-part series about de-stressing your life, Dr Rangan Chatterjee reveals the small dietary changes that will have a big impact on your mood, energy levels – and waistline
What’s your big goal for the year ahead? For millions, it’s to lose weight. For others, it might be to drink less, to exercise more, to eat better, sleep well or simply feel happier. Most of us are aware that these goals are interconnected. But what if I told you that the one thing underpinning all of them – and which you must tackle first, if you want to achieve any of them – is stress?
Many of us are blasé about stress, particularly on a day like today, assuming the odd break means we can get away with burning the candle at both ends forever. In fact, the World Health Organisation calls stress “the health epidemic of the 21st century.” As I explained in yesterday’s
Telegraph, up to 80per cent of all GP consultations are now thought to be somehow related to stress – and it can have devastating long-term consequences on the body.
Every day, I see patients in my south Manchester surgery who are stressing themselves to an early grave. I know a local accountant who is go-go-go the entire time. He never switches off, and his wife is worried. But because he has no serious symptoms at the moment, he won’t listen to either of us. He assumes nothing’s going wrong and that the stress isn’t harming him. But it’s probably damaging his body so much that, within a few years, I suspect he’ll be hit with a serious health crisis.
Too much stress contributes to the development of obesity, type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, strokes and Alzheimer’s disease. Stress is also a key player in insomnia, burnout and auto-immune disease, as well as many mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression.
Yesterday, I explained that stress is a two-way street. It makes us more likely to binge on bad food and alcohol, sleep badly and skip exercise – poor lifestyle choices that are significant stressors on our bodies, themselves. The very existence of stress generates more stress, and the more of it piles up, the less we’re able to cope.
So, over the next four days, I’m going to give you a series of practical solutions to help you de-stress the four key corners of your life: your diet, your day, your relationships and your digital world.
Most of them are simple and some take fewer than 15 minutes a day, but start slowly, and pick one or two of the easiest tips from each, before building up. You’re not aiming for perfection in any one corner, but balance across all four. The more you do, the easier it becomes to do the rest.
If you’re not sure where to start, pick the one thing you feel you can do straight away and try it for the next seven days. Bit by bit,
I’ve seen these tools change the lives of thousands of my patients. I know they’ll do the same for you.
What stress does to your weight
Stress, whether physical or emotional, is detected by a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which sets in motion a series of processes that prime your body to deal with danger. Sugars are released into our blood so that we can run faster. At the same time, muscle and liver cells within our body become resistant to the hormone insulin, so that this sugar remains in our bloodstream and available for the most important organ of all, our brain. Our heart starts to beat faster and our blood pressure rises, while non-essential processes such as digestion are switched off.
These effects are the phenomenal creations of evolution. But they’ve been designed to work for us in short, sharp bursts. The big problem in modern society is that we’re surrounded by triggers that continually activate our stress state. Long-term insulin resistance contributes to the development of type-2 diabetes and obesity. If attention is diverted away from digestion for too long, complaints such as constipation, bloating, indigestion and IBS will result. And short-term inflammation – the result of your immune system firing up to help you recover quickly, in case you’re wounded – can become chronic when it is not switched off.
Chronic inflammation is at the heart of many serious complaints that I see in my surgery every single day, including obesity and type-2 diabetes. All of these, combined, can cause our bodies to “hold” on to weight, no matter what our food intake.
Stress and the gut
Trying to tackle the stress of modern life by practising meditation or going on a break, while helpful, might have only a limited effect if the lifestyle choices we’re making in the kitchen are generating constant stress signals in our body through our gut.
We don’t think of that cheese and pickle baguette as something akin to
a radio station or a book. But, effectively, that’s what it is. The body reads information from that baguette, then sends it to the brain.
A key part of that communication stream comes from a hidden world we didn’t have much understanding of until recently: our gut microbiome, a massive population of different bugs that, in total, weigh about as much as the human brain.
Studies on animals find that an absence of gut bugs increases our reactivity to stress. This has led to some scientists calling them “our brain’s peacekeepers”. As amazing as it sounds, if we treat our gut bugs poorly, they can make us feel anxious and depressed. But if we treat them well, they can lighten our mood – as well as our weight. Here’s how…
1. Eat the alphabet
Eating a diverse diet rich in fibre is one of the single best things we can do to live a more stress-free life, as it will encourage a diverse and resilient microbiome. If we increase the variety of vegetables, low-glycaemic fruits (such as blueberries and cherries) and fibre-rich foods such as beans and legumes in our diet, we’ll increase the amount of fibre we’re eating, which encourages the growth of gut bugs, sending signals to your brain that everything is good. Eating fermented foods such as kimchi, sauerkraut or kefir, which introduce beneficial bacteria into your body, will also improve your gut health. Aim to eat at least 26 different plant foods every single month – to help you achieve this goal, you can download my Eat The Alphabet chart from drchatterjee.com/alphabetchart and pin it up in your kitchen.
2. Protect your microbiome
Modern life, it seems, is at war with our gut bugs. Besides the usual culprits – sugar, alcohol and smoking – highly processed foods, such as ready meals, biscuits, many breakfast cereals and some highly processed breads, can have a terrible effect on their health.
Some additives, emulsifiers, pesticides and artificial sweeteners can decimate them, as well as antibiotics used in food production and often over-prescribed by GPS. And our modern obsession with hygiene means that we are nuking many of our gut bugs with constant use of antibacterial sprays and hand-washing. Do your best to avoid what you can.
3. Restrict your eating window
Our gut bugs thrive when they get a break from food, giving them chance to clean up the gut wall. Give yourself a 12-hour window every day without food; for example, if you finish your evening meal at 7pm, don’t have your breakfast until 7am the next day. When my patients time-restrict their food intake, I have noticed it help with weight loss, blood-sugar control and general stress levels, as well as digestive disturbances such as indigestion and heartburn.
Evidence is also growing that an earlier dinner time is better for your weight, blood-sugar balance and stress levels. I recommend that you try to finish eating at least three hours before going to bed. For example, if 10pm is your bedtime, you want to finish your evening meal by 7pm. You may find this tricky at first if you are not used to it, but stick with it. Within one or two weeks of starting, patients often report back to me that their heartburn, indigestion and sleep quality improve as well. If you have to work late, consider taking some food with you or eating dinner in an early evening break.
4. Find your personal exercise prescription
One of the major problems with the human stress response is that it evolved to put us in fight-or-flight mode. But today’s stressors are very rarely physical – we won’t do much good by physically assaulting or running away from our email inbox, as much as we might like to. Exercise gives our body what it needs and is expecting: a physical workout that helps ease us out of fight-or-flight mode. Do a form of stress-busting exercise every day – as simple as a brisk walk at lunchtime, a highintensity interval session or a long jog. The key is to move your body as much as possible each day, in any way you like, and do a form of strength training at least twice a week.
It is also possible to over-exercise and cause your body more stress. If you’ve been super busy at work and didn’t sleep particularly well, it may be that you’re closer to your stress threshold and would benefit from a restorative form of exercise such as yoga or Pilates, rather than pounding away on the treadmill.
5. Treat yourself to sleep
If you’re not prioritising your sleep, it’s highly likely that you’re not getting enough. Sleep tends to be the first thing to be pushed to the side, because we just don’t realise how much we need it and how much stress a lack of it can cause.
If you look in the brain, you see a collapse in memory, attention, cognitive function, decision-making capacity and ability to learn new things.
In the body, levels of adrenalin, noradrenalin and cortisol increase, inflammatory markers go up, and we become resistant to insulin, which makes it more likely that we will develop type-2 diabetes.
Sleep deprivation is also linked to obesity because it causes hunger and satiety hormones to reverse, meaning that our appetite goes up and we feel less full, making weight gain more likely. If you are lacking in sleep, you’re going to be significantly less likely to eat the alphabet because you’ll be craving sugary junk food.
So, if you’ve had a bad day, rather than sitting on the sofa eating pizza, washing it down with half a bottle of wine and staying up late into the evening on social media, I’d like you to dim the lights, switch off your screens and gorge yourself on a generous portion of extra sleep.
Tomorrow: Raise your stress threshold
Modern life is at war with our gut bacteria, which increases our reactivity to stress