Last semester, I enrolled in a Sociological Methods course and did not expect to learn how to conduct a survey. Conducting a survey on campus was a process and there were plenty of steps that had to be taken before we could start collecting data. The instrument that was used to collect data was a questionnaire and each student received an envelope of 30 questionnaires. Each student was expected to distribute questionnaires to Howard University students and have each questionnaire completed. For my paper, I chose to focus on stress and weight gain/loss. I wanted to examine how stress could cause weight fluctuation and which stressors would cause weight gain or weight loss.

Stress is a person’s way of responding to any kind of demand whether it is good or bad. It is also a state of mental or emotional tension or strain from unfortunate situations. When people get stressed, they usually respond by eating or exercising to cope with their stressors. While some people may gain weight due to stress, the opposite may occur for others. For some people, stress can result in a person losing a drastic amount of weight. Ongoing stress can actually lead to anxiety, which could possibly trigger weight loss that is unintentional. A person who may experience anxiety can have a loss of appetite or stomach pains. The person could also have a feeling of fullness soon after eating, which could result in the person consuming less food.

Some people who are experiencing a lot of stress may forget to eat or put off eating to complete other tasks. For those people, eating is a low priority compared to what they have to accomplish in a short amount of time. This leads to people skipping meals, which is another factor of weight loss. This is the case for a lot of people who are experiencing lots of stress from very demanding circumstances. However, people who skip meals and simply forget to eat are putting themselves at risk of developing nutritional deficiencies. Having such deficiencies can lead to health problems and possibly increase the person’s anxiety levels.

Determining which events trigger a stress response more than others can be very tricky. People respond differently to certain stressors and may respond to them in a positive or negative way. Therefore, it is safe to say that the way a person responds to stress has an effect on their body weight. People might interpret stress as eustress and distress. Eustress is good stress, which is beneficial and healthy and distress is bad stress, which causes sorrow and anxiety. When I refer to stress in this study, I am referring to distress and how different forms of stress such as acute and chronic stress can influence how much weight a person either gains or loses. Acute stress comes from demands and pressures of the past and those that will come in the future. Chronic stress comes when a person can never see a way out of a bad situation. Both forms can have an impact on a person’s body and how they respond to potential stressors.

Every person has their own way of allowing what affects them and what does not affect them. Stress can have a negative impact on a person’s body or mind, but it is the person’s decision in which they respond to that stressor. If a person is pessimistic, they would most likely respond to a stressor by becoming tense, irritable, annoyed, and short-tempered. However, if a person is optimistic, they would most likely respond to a stressor by showing an opposite pattern of behavior and remain calm in the situation. Stress can be good or bad, but it is the bad stress that can cause a person to either gain or lose a significant amount of weight.

My hypothesis is there is a direct relationship between stress and weight gain and weight loss. Students who are constantly stressed due to school, work, family, etc. are more likely to gain or lose weight. Students are usually stressed because of the amount of homework they are assigned by their professors and how many hours they work for an employer including other additional factors. A student that goes to school full time and works part time or full time usually does not have much time on their hands. If the student is not in school, they are at work and if the student is not at work, then they are in school. They are always on the move because they either have to go to class or go to work. Going to school and working at the same time can be very demanding and could overwhelm a student. As a result, the student could become stressed because they never have time to relax due to their workload.

The student experiencing a significant amount of stress may eat more or less depending on how they cope with their stress. If the student exercises vigorously to cope with stress, then the student is most likely going to lose weight. However, if the student eats too much food especially junk food throughout the day, then the student is most likely going to gain weight. I believe this study will prove that stressors can increase your possibility of gaining or losing weight. Throughout this research, we should discover if stressors such as work, school, and family can have a major impact on a person’s weight.

After handing out my questionnaires and collecting the data, I preceded to choose my antecedent, intervening, independent, and dependent variables for the data analysis. Each student had to use statistical procedures in order to analyze the data. The first statistical procedure was finding the frequency distribution and percentage distribution of the index of the dependent variable, which is weight gain and/or weight loss. The next step in the data analysis was to find the matrix of correlation coefficients resulting from the intercorrelation of the variables in the study. The last step in the data analysis section involved getting the results of the regression of weight gain and weight loss on a model composed of selected independent variables. Finally, I came to a conclusion after reading all of my findings. I concluded that there was not a direct relationship between stress and weight gain and weight loss.