Imagine meeting your significant other at the restaurant where one year ago today you had your first date. You picked the spot because you’re a romantic at heart, a wedding ring is in your pocket, and you plan to propose.

Before the waiter can serve the appetizer, though, your fiancée-to-be says it’s over. She recently met someone who she feels is “the one.”

You take a long swill of ice water to steady your nerves, but what do you do next? Stand up and walk out? Stay seated and start a scene?

Either way - unless you’re as emotionless as an alarm clock - you’ve lost something else besides the love of your life.

Your appetite.

Even though this is a conjured up story, the last part of it is not. A review of all the scientific literature on how stress affects appetite published in the July 2018 issue of the medical journal Cureus found situations that create “acute” stress, like an unexpected break up, decrease eating.

It also determined “chronic” stress does the opposite.

Meaning the love of your life won’t come back to you just because you sit at home night after night pining for her, but that other thing you lost on that same night, your appetite, will. In fact, your new main squeeze could very well become the plastic container of chocolate sauce whose contents top off that heaping bowl of Rocky Road ice cream you now eat nightly.

And even though you picked that flavor because its name is so apropos of your recent emotional travels, science says glucocorticoids - the hormone produced by your body to fight inflammation - served as a sort of matchmaker to bring you two together.

Science also says if you don’t control chronic stress, the continual secretion of glucocorticoids could cause you to gain weight. A scientific study published in the April 2018 issue of Cell Metabolism helps explain why.

Over a span of 21 days, researchers served mice a “hormone cocktail that mimics glucocorticoids” as well as the same diet they fed a control group. By the end, the cocktail sippers tipped the scales at twice the weight.

Along with the extra weight came new fat cells, as well as ample growth in the existing ones.

But something about the production of new fat cells didn’t make sense to scientists.

Mice were used in this experiment since almost all their genes function as the same way as humans, as well as their digestive and hormonal systems. Yet in studies of healthy people, it’s been found that no more than 1% of what are called precursor cells become fat cells when triggered by glucocorticoids secretion.

This discrepancy led to further research performed at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and published in two parts (in the June issue of Cell Reports and the August issue of the National Academy of Sciences) to help explain why the mice drinking the glucocorticoids-producing cocktail got so fat.

What they found is the mice’s fat cells, just like the other cells in their bodies, are run by that same circadian clock that runs afoul in yours after you fly across a few time zones. And that chronic stress creates its own sort of metabolic jet lag.

Which causes weight gain.

Researchers led by Mary Teruel, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medicine and senior author of both studies, artificially induced stress by implanting pellets containing glucocorticoids in a group of mice eating the same healthy diet as a control group. By the study’s end, the pellet-implanted mice weighed 9% more on average than the control group.

Moreover, what a Medical New Today article dubbed “fat expansion” more than doubled. When the pellets were removed, the other adverse health changes directly related to their implantation, such as an increase in insulin secretion - a harbinger of not only weight gain but also type 2 diabetes - quickly ceased.

Dr. Teruel explained to MNT this illustrates how chronic stress makes weight gain more likely even if you’re eating a healthy diet in the proper amounts to maintain your current weight. That’s information you certainly need to know - especially since the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” poll found daily stress to now be at “unprecedented” levels.

But instead of downing a bowl of Rocky Road drowning in chocolate sauce, there are a number of other the things you can do.

In my mind, the most effective is practicing mindfulness - the psychological process of actively paying attention to the moment at hand - something that the National Institute of Mental Health encourages you to do as well.

The NIH also suggests you exercise, eat regular and healthy meals, create a restful sleep routine, keep a journal, and be on the lookout for and “challenge your negative and unhelpful thoughts,” as well as converse with trusted family members and friends when you fear emotional stress may be getting the best of you.