dealing with stress & trying to lose weight

onefortyone

I don't know if I would believe the phrase 'stress causes weight gain', because you don't see soldier's deploying to war zones and coming back fat, or air traffic controllers putting on 10lbs a day (and that is a VERY stressful job). It may make it more diffcult to lose, you may lose slower - but to me, a deficit is a deficit. You have to get energy from somewhere, and in a deficit it'll be your from your fat cells.

Usually stress causes weight gain by impacting the lifestyle - you don't care as much about what you eat, may not log it correctly, estimate portion size, or you don't push yourself when you work out, etc. You may be less active in general - suddenly your active lifestyle may slow down because you're too stressed to keep up with it, you may even be retaining water which masks weight loss, and so on.