When we feel stressed out, it triggers a chemical in our body called cortisol. Constant deadlines, arguing with your significant other, traffic, any kind of stressor can turn on the alarm in your brain that triggers the release of stress hormones.

The adrenal gland releases large amounts of the hormone cortisol, a chemical that the body calls upon in times of stress unleashing the fight or flight response. Stress signals leading to the release of cortisol can lead not only to weight gain in general, but also promotes the tendency to store visceral fat around the midsection. The hardest fat to get rid of. These are fat cells that are located deep in the abdomen, and while not only putting fat in the stomach area, have been linked to an increase in both diabetes and heart disease.

Stress has been proven to give the stressed person a propensity to opt for fat laden foods. Kind of a food therapy, or food self-medication. While more fattening foods or comfort foods may ease the stress momentarily, of course it's putting weight on you at the same time.

So the question is - is stress making you fat? Yes, and it will in particular put weight in the abdominal area.

Cortisol has gotten a lot of attention in the medical arena and the media because in addition to the fat quandary, it appears to play a role in all sorts of stress-related health problems.

To make matters worse, cortisol can also increase the size of individual fat cells. So for anyone with a larger waist, your waist size could easily be an outward sign of stress. There was a study a few years ago in Psychosomatic Medicine that found that women with mostly abdominal obesity produced larger amounts of cortisol when faced with a task they considered difficult.

Cortisol is not our friend when it comes to weight gain. The experts say that you can't blame all weight gain on this hormone, but in many cases, you can bet stress is a factor in stomach weight gain.