Researchers have identified another villain in obesity: pure exhaustion. A study of nearly 14,000 men and women found people were more likely to gain excessive amounts of weight -- five per cent or more of their body weight -- if they scored high on a measure of vital exhaustion. And that raises the question: Is the combined stress of work and home making people fat?
Vital exhaustion is a psychological state in which people experience fatigue, irritability and feelings of demoralization. Other studies have found the condition dramatically increases the risk of a first, and repeat, heart attack.
An estimated 30 to 60 per cent of cardiac "events" are preceded by vital exhaustion.
Obesity is associated with mental stress and heart disease.
The British and American team wondered whether vital exhaustion can lead to a prediction of obesity.
"In other words, you have those feelings, those feelings lead to weight gain, and that weight gain leads to cardiac events," says co-author June Stevens, chair of the department of nutrition in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "That's what we were hypothesizing."
Their study, published in the journal Obesity, looked at the association between vital exhaustion and body mass index among 13,727 white and African-American men and women, aged 45 to 64.
After height and weight were measured, participants filled out a questionnaire that asked, among other things:
- Do you often feel tired?
- Do you wake up repeatedly during the night?
- Do you have the feeling that you have not been accomplishing much lately?
- Do you believe that you have come to a "dead end"?
- Do you lately feel more listless than before?
- Does it take more time to grasp a difficult problem than it did a year ago?
- Do little things irritate you more than they used to?
- Do you have increasing difficulty in concentrating on a single subject for long?
Heavier people had higher levels of vital exhaustion to begin with, and when researchers checked back three and six years later, white men and women -- but not African-Americans -- with high vital exhaustion had gained more weight.
Researchers can't explain the cultural differences. And heavier people tend to gain more weight over time. But white women who scored high on vital exhaustion were 34 per cent more likely to gain an excess amount of weight -- five per cent or more of their body weight -- over the study period than women who scored low.
"And it was 35 per cent in white men," Stevens says. "That's a sizable weight gain."
But it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma, Steven says. It could be "reverse causality," meaning the extra weight could be causing exhaustion. But understanding the link could lead to better targeted treatments to reduce vital exhaustion, prevent future weight gain and improve weight loss interventions.
The finding fits with what researchers have seen in animals. "If you stress animals enough they go into this stage where they stop moving, they just eat and they have hormonal changes that promote fat absorption in the abdomen," says Dr. Arya Sharma, professor of medicine and chair for cardiovascular obesity research and management at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
They also have intense cravings for carbohydrates.
David Ogden -Tomorrows Home Business
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