#Fact:  Women gain weight due to stress at workplace

NP NEWS 24 ONLINE:  Have you gained weight suddenly? It is all because of stress at your workplace.

 A recent study suggests that heavy pressures at work seem to predispose women to weight gain irrespective of whether they have received an academic education or not.

The study showed that long-term exposure to high job demands played a part only for women. In just over half of the women who are to high demands, a major increase in weight took place over the 20 years. This gain in weight was some 20 per cent higher than in women subject to low job demands.

On the other hand, women and men with a low degree of control in their work more often gained much weight, defined as a weight gain of 10 per cent or more.

Lead author Sofia Klingberg said, “We were able to see that high job demands played a part in women’s weight gain, while for men there was no association between high demands and weight gain.”

“When it came to the level of demands at work, only the women are affected. We haven’t investigated the underlying causes, but it may conceivably be about a combination of job demands and the greater responsibility for the home that women often assume. This may make it difficult to find time to exercise and live a healthy life,” Klingberg added.

For the study, published in the journal International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, the team included 3,872 women and men who were investigated on three occasions over a 20-year period with respect to such variables as body weight and demands and control at work.

They were followed either from age 30 to 50 or from 40 to 60. Efforts to cut work-related stress would likely make a decrease not only in weight gain but also ill-health including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, the researchers noted.