Top 9 reasons on how stress affects eating

We are all if not all the time, under some level of stress in dealing with our daily routines. Be it stress at the work place, college, school or even at home, it still pervades us. We will discuss the top ten reasons on how stress affects our eating over the next few days.

Reason #1: The relation between food cravings and stress. - Stress can have a powerful effect on your appetite and food cravings. Stress affects how you absorb nutrients, the way your body chooses healthy foods and how you digest those foods. For a number of people, food becomes a mechanism for coping with stress.

Reason #2: One can eat food at random hours due to stress. - The emotional eater: Emotional eaters choose food when they are feeling anxious due to which they have a tendency to overeat at every meal. They may put off eating until dinner, and then overindulge. This kind of an eater turns to food when feeling stressed after a bad day at work, is frustrated due to an overload of chores or when a relationship turns sour.

Reason #3: Some people find food unappetizing due to stress. - The restrictive eater. These kind of eaters restrict their food intake, which in turn increases their stress because they stop themselves from eating certain kinds of foods. These eaters diet frequently, many a times by ignoring entire food groups and depriving their body of vital nutrients. Restrictive eaters keep binging, putting themselves in a stress-related eating situation, leading to life-long weight fluctuations.

Reason #4: Stress eaters take eating as a coping mechanism. - In a perfect world, your body would experience stress, handle your response to it and your body’s systems would return to normal. Unfortunately, this does not always happen. When a threat is perceived, whether real or not, you keep thinking about it. The power of your imagination causes your body to respond as though a threat is real, even if it is not. This is the root of what is called the ‘stress response.’

The longer an acute stress phase lasts, the more difficult time you have getting out of it. If you handle stress with food, entering the stress cycle causes you to turn to food as a coping mechanism.

Reason #5: Food preferences can change due to stress. - Numerous studies show that or emotional or physical distress increases the intake of food high in, sugar, fat, or both. High insulin levels in combination with High cortisol levels, may be responsible. Once ingested, sugar and fat filled foods seem to have a feedback effect on the body which inhibits activity in the parts of the brain that process and produce stress and related emotions. These foods really are “comfort” foods because they seem to counteract stress and this may contribute to people’s stress-induced craving for those foods.

Reason #6: Weight gain could be one of the causes of stress. - A recent large-scale study in Finland found that body mass index was highest in stress-driven eaters and that they tended to eat more foods like, chocolate and pizza, hamburgers, sausages, compared to others.

Reason #7: An impulsive trait such as over eating, could be caused due to stress. - As much as people would like to blame all their weight gain on stress, experts say that eating as a response to stress could also be a learned habit – one that is merely encouraged by brain chemistry.

Reason #8: 'compensatory behavior’ is one of the consequences of stress. - When stress drives you to make unhealthy food-related decisions, you may feel newly stressed as a result and try to undo the effects of your decision. Unhealthy behavior such as purging, fasting and over-exercising may result. Vomiting what you have eaten, often occurs when one wants to take pleasure in eating an unhealthy kind of food but one soon experiences stress when considering the consequences of such an act, like weight gain. It can also occur as a result of wanting to feel completely in control of food intake. Fasting, or skipping meals, is a way that many with bad eating habits cope with the stress of unhealthy eating. Over-exercising, an attempt to quickly burn off all the calories consumed, can lead to injury or illness.

Reason #9: What is consumed by us could be a reason for stress. - Certain foods have the ability to stabilize level of cortisol in our body, which is the stress hormone. Some studies have found that foods packed with omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, and magnesium help reduce these cortisol levels. When our body is in a continuous state of stress, it breaks down protein to guard itself. Eating a protein-rich diet, including dairy and fish, can help refurbish the protein in your body and keep cortisol le