Abs Diet: Stress Management  

Try some of these simple tricks when stress leaves you breathing harder than a bunch of frat brothers at a Girls Gone Wild shoot.

 

Reward your body. Regular exercise or relaxation techniques like yoga and massage will keep cortisol naturally in check by releasing beta-endorphins, brain chemicals that give you a calming effect.

 

Start strong. A recent study from Wales shows that regular consumption of breakfast cereal is associated with reduced stress and improved physical and mental health. Those who ate cereal daily had lower levels of cortisol. On the Abs Diet, that means oatmeal and bran cereals.

 

Snuff out the midnight oil. Regularly working overtime may inflate your weight. The stress of a string of 12-hour days can cause a spike in cortisol that stimulates hunger.

 

Fight with fish. That is, integrate more salmon and tuna into your life. When Swiss researchers fortified men’s diets with omega-3 fatty acids (fats found in fish), levels of cortisol remained unchanged during stress tests. (The placebo group’s cortisol rose by one-third.)

 

Get up and get out. A recent Australian study discovered that workers whose jobs require more than 6 hours of chair time a day are up to 68 percent more likely to wind up overweight or obese.

 

 

 

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