While revising for my nutrition exam, I was profoundly affected by reading Malcolm Kendrick on how stress probably impacts on your health much more severely than nutrition.
As a result, I believe that stress may be the biggest factor in our training that we are not currently addressing properly. Since I am concerned with optimising my health, training and fitness as much as possible, look out for more posts from me on the role of stress and how to manage it.
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What is stress, anyway? – in this introduction, I take a quick look at the history of how stress has been studied and defined by various academics, and then consider how it can be defined as acute short-term stress and chronic long-term stress
How does stress work? – in this more detailed post, I break down the hormonal pathways of the two key mechanisms that operational during a stressful experience: the fight-or-flight response and the hypothalamic-pituituary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis
How does stress make you ill? – and in this article, I finally get to the mechanisms by which stress causes people to get ill. There’s a lot going on here, so be prepared for some heavy lifting…
How does stress make you fat? – a lot of people talk about stress making you fat without going into the detail of how it happens. Here is the low-down on how it happens, hormonally, along with a bunch of studies for you to check out
How can we reduce stress? – finally, at the end of the long road of stress articles, I take a different look at how we can reduce chronic stress-related obesity and sickness, based on the research and the factors that cause it to happen in the first place
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Still can’t find what you’re looking for? Check out my book reviews on stress and don’t forget you can always contact me for help…
