Working makes me fat

I’ve begun to think the reason I remain fat is because of my career. There are the obvious reasons that I spend most of my day with my butt in a chair, and I am a stress eater. Despite those truths, I have been eating healthily and exercising, yet I cannot lose any weight. Today, I read that stress is a major hindrance to weight loss.

“That’s because when you are stressed out, your body produces more of the hormone called cortisol. Increased cortisol contributes to fat storage, particularly in the waist…”

I must be filled to my eyeballs with this coritsol crap.

“The amount of cortisol released by your body depends on how much stress is experienced and how you handle it. Some people are highly reactive to stress and show substantial biological changes, including considerable cortisol release.”

Being fat stresses me out. I’m perpetuating my own problem. Yay.

“Studies on stress, eating and cortisol found that women with excess weight in the abdominal area released more cortisol when stressed than women with weight distributed elsewhere. Also, women who release high levels of cortisol caused by stress eat more when stressed.”

Great. Fan-fucking-tastic. Well, at least I don't have "cankles."

Another article suggested you should reduce the amount of stress in your life by sitting on the floor and repeating, “om.” No, I’m not making this up.

Am I the only one who hates articles that suggest such bullshit solutions to reducing stress?

Architecture is an industry built upon stress, no matter how much one might try to avoid it, ignore it, or deal with it. Personally, I have not been able to manage any of those strategies successfully. Below, I have listed some of the classic physical manifestations of stress. I am thinking about posting these permanently somewhere, and keeping track of which ones I suffer from every day. Wouldn’t that be fun?

1. Aches and pains
2. Headaches
3. Indigestion
4. Appetite increase or decrease
5. Muscle tension in neck, face or shoulders
6. Sleeping problems
7. Heart-racing
8. Tiredness, exhaustion
9. Trembling/shaking
10. Upset stomach

Today, I am suffering from numbers 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10; plus, I keep alternating between becoming too hot, and having chills- all as a result of events related to my current project. Part of this is a residual from yesterday’s fiasco. Yesterday afternoon, we were preparing plans that we would send out today, but one of the clients wanted an “early copy,” and he wanted it RIGHT THAT MOMENT. Apparently, the computer can’t handle this type of pressure any better than I, so it began giving me “fatal error” messages. AutoCAD crashed four times in ten minutes. (It seems to crash in relation to how urgently I need things.) Once I got home last night, I made the mistake of weighing myself. Presto, more stress! I woke up this morning, sore from my pitiful workout the night before, and wondering what the point of it all was, if I was still doomed to be a fatass. I was depressed before I even got to work. Once I got there, the stress hit me like a frying pan to the face. I “scheduled” a 2-minute crying jag in the ladies’ room before attempting to pull my shit together and getting back to work.

I feel like I’m completely losing it. I even broke my "I will not post from work" rule for the first time today. I’m still trying to ride the “new guy high,” and produce, produce, produce. Don’t complain. Work hard. Give everything you have. Suck it up. Just shut up and draw it. I’m starting to crack from it all, just like I would in school- except now, there’s no summer break for me to recover.