Stress and Obesity

Obesity is a circumstance in which the energy reserve within human body is raised to a degree where it can create certain health conditions or an increased death rate. Obesity is becoming viewed as a growing public health threat. Obesity is being believed to predispose different diseases like sleep apnea, cardiovascular diseases, etc.

Stress is a major factor in Obesity. Emotions and environment stress impacts a person's overeating practice significantly.

Emotional status normally plays upon the mind of the consumer of the food while he/she is eating something. When individuals are not in an emotionaly stable position as the result of some stress, they tend to fall back to over eating.

In the psychological opinion, there are two chief points of view regarding obesity. These are the outwardness hypothesis and the psychodynamic hypothesis.

It is seen that overeating is believed to be a means of diminishing anxiety, relieving frustration and deprivation, calming oneself, diminishing guilt and handling anxiety. Theorists Rakoff and Garetz describe overeating as a means of dealing with emotions like anxiety, anger, desperation, and depression, all of which are associated with stress.

Kornhaber characterizes the obese individuals overeating pattern as occurring in response to emotional distress, especially depression.

From these analyses it is quite evident that when an obese person experiences stress, particularly when the cause of the stress is unclear, he/she will react by eating. The obese individual may use food in an endeavor to recover a sense of self control when that sense is disturbed. Then overeating will lead the individual who is hurting from the stress to be obese which may then trigger certain other problems.

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