Women and weight

A group of women in their 30s gather at a buffet restaurant for lunch. The one who showed up last says something that threw cold water on the talkative atmosphere. “It’s been a long time. You`ve got fat. What happened?”

Men would not understand why gaining weight should be linked with an incident.

For women, weight gained or lost is very easy to notice at a glance. If one gained weight suddenly, something must have happened.

A Finnish occupational health institute announced an interesting result of its one-year study of the lifestyle of 230 women at ages between 30 and 55. The institute found that 22 percent of the women plunged into “emotional eating” when they were under stress.

“Emotional eating” refers to an eating disorder in which one cannot stop eating until the food in front the eyes is gone because of anger or stresses. What causes such a situation is not the hunger in the stomach, but hunger in the mind. The cerebral nerves that control the desire to eat is located not in the brain part that controls reasoning, but that controls the emotion (hypothalamus).

Many women who are sensitive to the hunger in the mind eat to fill the emptiness caused by stresses. They eat because of their demanding work or difficult bosses. Then, they suffer from the obsession for diet, which in turn, causes them to eat more. They eat again because they are disappointed by themselves. They eat because of loneness.

The hunger in the mind causes a vicious circle. When mental stresses cause the secretion of cortisol and insulin, they stimulate the hypothalamus, causing the desire to eat. The appetite caused by stresses puts one under compulsion to want sweet or greasy food, causing more fat to accumulate in the body. Fat accumulated in the liver triggers resistance to insulin, sending signals to pancreas to keep secreting insulin, which stimulates the desire to eat.

The brain, however, gets out of stresses when the body has continued accumulation of fat. It is the result of long evolution. The human brain enters into relaxation when the body has fat accumulated enough to endure a certain period of situation without food consumption.

This is why a thick waist is an indicator of obesity and stresses. Women’s questions about why one has gotten fat are based on so much empirical grounds.

For a long time, eating has been the ultimate joy and topic of conversation for women. But the dilemma is that while enjoying such delicious food as much as they want, they have to stay fit.

Such a wish of catching two hares at once is almost impossible to achieve. To women, however, breaking the impossibility is the success that everyone else envies.