Stress and Food. Eating Under Pressure #StressPsychology #Foo | Alter Ego

Stress and Food. Eating Under Pressure

#StressPsychology #FoodPsychology
Reading time ~ 4min

Few of us feel good about ourselves if we eat unhealthy and gain weight. Under pressure, controlling our diet can be even more difficult, which can worsen the stress. How do we build a more positive relationship with food?

In cultures that associate beauty with being thin, food can become inherently stressful. A better understanding of our own impulses can help us to develop a more positive relationship with food, even when we’re under stress.

There are sound biological reasons why, under stress, many of us are prone to overeating. Stress prompts the body to release the hormone cortisol, which stimulates appetite. The body has evolved to deal with physical threats such as avoiding predatory animals: cortisol prompts us to build up the body’s food stores in preparation for fight or flight. This explains why we comfort eat: it’s not greed, but the body’s inherent response to stress.

Cortisol is also associated with wanting junk food. A 2001 American study found that “high cortisol reactors” – volunteers who released higher amounts of cortisol in response to a perceived threat – ate similar amounts to “low cortisol reactors” in calm circumstances, but ate significantly more sugar and fat when subjected to stress.

American exercise scientist Christine Maglione-Garves has also observed that cortisol increases the storage of belly fat: calorie for calorie, stressed people gain more weight. A 2005 American study found that weight gain may be a way of turning off our stress response: lab rats kept in stressful conditions showed a drop in cortisol once they’d accumulated a certain amount of belly fat. What’s more, a 2009 American study found that when monkeys were fed a high-calorie diet, monkeys living under greater stress gained more weight than the less-stressed monkeys.

In short, if you’re prone to feeling guilty or insecure because of your diet or body image, try to be kinder to yourself. Stress is likely a major contributor, and self-loathing only makes you feel worse. Your first step should be to reduce your stress by ceasing to blame yourself.

Should you diet?

Healthy eating is good for both our physical and psychological well-being, so if you’d like to shift to a more balanced diet, that’s probably a good idea: ask a doctor or a dietician to give you some pointers on how to get started.

However, it’s wise to be skeptical of extreme diets that promise you rapid weight loss in a matter of weeks: multiple studies confirm that these are neither nutritious nor a stress-busting solution. Crash diets of this kind don’t address the underlying causes of the weight gain, so their effects don’t last.