Anger can help you gain weight, says study

If you needed one more reason not to sulk, a nutrition expert explains how anger can become one more enemy when it comes to losing weight. No matter how much exercise you do, if you keep “eating” your guts (literally and figuratively), you’ll never reach your goal weight.

O awesome.club researched a little more about the relationship between being overweight and feelings when eating and presents its findings here.

He who gets angry gets fat 🇧🇷He who gets angry gets fat) is the title of the book, still untranslated into Portuguese, by the Mexican nutritionist Juan Manuel Romero Villa. In the work, he states that anger can be the reason for being overweight and explores the relationship between emotions and consumed food, emphasizing that excess weight goes beyond the physical, as it also serves as a shell to face situations such as pain, anguish, etc.

What does anger have to do with getting fat? In practical terms, when you’re irritated, your body starts secreting adrenaline and cortisol. The latter is a hormone released in response to stress and is responsible for raising blood sugar levels. It is normally produced when exercising, but if its source is anger, the glucose generated cannot be used by the cells and ends up being deposited in the body in the form of fat.

The book is the result of more than a decade of work by the author, adding academic research, experiences with his patients and even with himself. He detected that many of his overweight patients had anger as a common feeling, evidencing the relationship between obesity and the misuse of this emotion.

In fact, overweight and obesity can have endogenous (internal) causes, such as metabolic syndrome and hormonal or thyroid problems, or exogenous (external), such as poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Thus, anger is one more element that contributes to excess weight, but not the only one.

Negative emotions, such as anger, sadness or anxiety, affect the way a person eats and, in many cases, become the causes of overweight and obesity. These emotions are channeled through the food, which becomes an unconscious protection against emotional difficulties.

Nutritionist Sigrid Pimentel Martín states that “emotions are energy that turn into excess weight, indigestion and a weak immune system”, so learning to identify and manage them will have a very positive effect for the individual, improving their mood and their relationship with food.

It’s about taking control of your emotions and finding more positive ways to channel them. One way would be to exercise, but you could also pursue a hobby like painting, drawing, writing, or just going for a walk when you feel you need to relax a bit.

Being aware of your eating habits is the key to improving them, so you will also be able to detect what are the factors that lead you to eat more unhealthy foods. A good advice is to wait 5 minutes before giving in to an urge. So instead of automatically eating, take some time to reflect on how you feel and whether you can actually avoid eating such food.

Eating is such a common act that people often don’t pay enough attention to it, which is why it’s best to avoid distractions such as television or cell phones. That is, at meal time, food should be the protagonist.

To improve eating habits in the long term, it is necessary to adopt an introspective exercise, connecting with your emotions and noticing how they become triggers of certain behaviors in front of food. This is a great way to attack the root of the problem.

Now that you know a little more about the relationship between emotions and being overweight, maybe you should think about whether you’ve been very angry lately. Do you think this is your case? Leave your opinion in the comments.