Previous articles have highlighted the importance of combining a healthy diet and exercise program with equally healthy lifestyle habits. The questions then are: What exactly are these lifestyle habits that should be adopted for life and what are their effects on weight loss? This article will answer these two questions.
But first, we must emphasize that the discussion will focus on three aspects of lifestyle: smoking, stress, and sleep. Other aspects such as patterns of sexual and social behavior are not discussed.
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If there is an advantage to smoking cigarettes, it is that the activity stimulates the metabolism. In pack-a-day smokers, 250 calories are burned through activity alone. So when you quit smoking, you’ll likely gain up to 2 pounds within 2 weeks of quitting, since your body has to deal with an extra 250 calories.
Then you will go back to smoking because of your fear of gaining weight, however illogical it may seem. But you should stick to kicking the cigarette habit because your metabolism will level off in about 2 months. Therefore, the extra kilos gained can be lost with the right diet and exercise soon enough.
In addition, one must consider the benefits of quitting smoking in relation to exercise and, therefore, weight loss. Your heart, arteries, and lungs become healthier, which means you have the physical ability to perform more intense, frequent, and prolonged cardiovascular exercise than before.
Stress
Yes, stress can lead to weight gain, which is possible both physiologically and psychologically. First of all, the neuroendocrine system activates the fight or flight hormones present when we face stressful situations, these hormones are adrenaline, CRH (corticotropin-releasing hormone) and cortisol. High levels of adrenaline and CRH decrease appetite, but the effect is temporary, while cortisol increases appetite: combine the impact of these three hormones and you are likely to binge eat.
Second, stress can lead to emotional eating even when the stressors have been absent for a long time. For example, the death of loved ones in a tragic accident puts an extreme strain on the emotions of the mourners with food as their primary source of earthly comfort. We have heard so many stories of people getting bigger as they grieve.
sleeping
When it comes to sleep, its relationship to weight loss can be traced back to two hormones: leptin and ghrelin. These two hormones work in a check and balance system that controls feelings of hunger (ghrelin) and satiety (leptin).
When you don’t get enough sleep in a day, your leptin levels drop while your ghrelin levels go up. The result is that you don’t feel full even after a heavy meal and you always look hungry. This is the beginning of overeating and therefore weight gain.
Therefore, if you want to lose weight, we suggest that you quit your smoking habit, control your stress levels and get enough sleep: the hallmarks of a healthy lifestyle, indeed. There are many ways to achieve these goals, including exercising, eating a healthy diet, applying relaxation techniques, and more. But the most important thing is to start now.
