Stress and Eating Habits

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Full Episode Transcript:

Stress and Eating Habits

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. Today I bring to you a podcast episode that may be a little bit eye opening for you AND I’m going to share some simple tips for you to start feeling in control over your eating habits when experiencing stress in your body. So, it’ll be an interesting episode for sure. I think so at least.

You might have already known that there is a link between stress and eating habits, or you may have experienced it personally. I think that you’ll be really interested in the data that I’m going to present to you in this podcast episode though.

So first, I have a question for you. Have you personally experienced eating sweet, salty, or fatty foods that you knew weren’t great for you, however you found yourself eating them while feeling stressed?

For example, maybe after a meeting you walk by some treats that someone brought in, and normally you wouldn’t eat the cookies at 10 in the morning, however you were so stressed after the meeting, that those cookies looked like excellent stress relief.

This might happen immediately after you feel the stress, or it could have just been a generally stressful day and you decide to reward yourself with a treat when you get home to try to “take some of the stress away” and the thought of that treat helps you feel a little bit better in the moment.

This was pretty common with me after a tough day in the hospital. Sometimes I wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to eat something right then and there, however I would start to think about what I would treat myself with at home to help “wash away” some of that stress.

So, if you have noticed that you’ve personally eaten in response to stress, or even skipped a meal due to stress, because this can happen as well, you are not alone.

I’ll of course also share a few things that you can do to help decrease the likelihood that you respond to stress with food, or less commonly, with avoiding food, meaning skipping a meal.

Alright, so there’s plenty of research out there that shows that humans tend to seek out pleasure and want to avoid pain or discomfort. This is part of the motivational triad. The third part is conservation of energy. If you’ve been following me for a while, I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about the motivational triad before.

Stress is seen as uncomfortable. Tasty food is seen as pleasurable. Generally, these foods include sugary foods, salty, savory, or fatty foods. This is by design and I won’t get into all of that but it basically was because these were higher calorie foods that helped with survival back in the day when none of us were around yet.

So of course, the natural human brain response when you feel stress is to want to decrease that stress because it’s uncomfortable, in some cases very uncomfortable. Tasty food is an easy way to do this, for a few reasons, but one of which is because tasty food is pleasurable. It helps to counteract the discomfort from the stress.

Makes complete sense, right?

I’m sure you’ve noticed personally, that if you are feeling stressed, you tend to not want to eat a carrot. It’s typically something more tasty than that. Although, perhaps there are some people who think carrots are as delicious as desserts, potato chips, what have you. Most humans do not.

With food being readily available and a really big part of our environment, either at home, work, or out in town, it’s very easy to access food. Therefore, it makes a very quick and easy stress reliever oftentimes.

Unfortunately, it’s not an effective stress reliever in the long run, but I won’t get too much into that in today’s episode. It can actually make managing your emotions more difficult in the future.

So there’s lots of research that shows that humans tend to seek higher calorie and higher fat foods during periods of stress and another unfortunate thing is when you’re in a state of emotional stress, your body stores more fat than usual.

Therefore, this is the exact time that you don’t want to be eating higher calorie or higher fat foods if you are trying to lose weight.

Of course, in the moment, you are either not aware of this negative physical effect, or if you are aware, sometimes the stress is so bothersome, that you’re sort of bypassing this awareness because you just want to decrease that stress no matter what.

Now my hope with doing this podcast episode is to help bring you that awareness if you weren’t aware already, and then of course to bring into consideration some things you can do to help if you are noticing that you are eating or not eating due to stress.

So now for some of the interesting data. According to the American Psychological Association there was a survey done called Stress in America that in addition to other research that has already been done suggests that stress does influence our eating habits.

In summary, the survey concluded that many adults do report eating either unhealthy foods or amounts, or skipping meals due to stress and that they have experienced some negative consequences of such.

I don’t know when exactly this survey was done, however according to the APA, 38% of American adults said that they had either overeaten or eaten unhealthy foods in the past month from the date that the survey was done. And then about half of those adults said that they overate or ate unhealthy foods in response to stress at least once a week.

One-third of those adults who reported overeating or eating unhealthy foods because of stress said that it helped to distract them from the stress and that’s why they did it. My question would be was it purely the pleasure and decreasing of the discomfort of stress, or was the action of eating more of the distraction.

Also, 1/3 of those adults who reported overeating or eating unhealthy foods because of stress defined their particular eating behavior as habit for them. I don’t know what exactly they meant by habit, as far as the true definition.

I’m guessing they probably felt as though the eating behavior was automatic and felt like something out of their control. However, I do not know for certain because I was not the one asking them these questions.

Now on the flip side, according to the survey, 30% of adults reported skipping a meal due to stress. And then 41% of those, reported doing that at least once a week.

Skipping a meal, could certainly result in excessive hunger sensations, headache, nausea, weakness, fatigue, lethargy. None of which are desirable effects. And certainly excessive hunger sensations could ultimately result in over eating at the next meal, or making some poor decisions regarding food based on wanting to just make that excessive hunger sensation go away quickly.

Of the adults who reported that they skipped meals due to stress, a whopping 67% reported that they just had a lack of appetite when they were feeling stressed. 26% said that they skipped the meal because they didn’t feel they had time to eat.

Now here where some of the negative consequences come into play. About half of the adults who overate or ate unhealthy foods in response to stress reported feeling disappointed in themselves, a little bit less than half reported feeling bad about their bodies and a little bit more than a third reported that they felt sluggish or lazy.

And then for those who skipped meals due to stress, about a quarter said that they felt sluggish or lazy and a little bit less than 1/4 reported that they felt irritable.

The survey also reported that women were more likely than men to report a change in their eating behaviors due to stress. Does that mean that women are more likely to eat in response to stress? Not necessarily.

So besides potential physical downsides to your eating habits changing in response to stress, whether that be overeating or eating unhealthy foods, or skipping meals, There are also non- physical downsides.

Meaning, some emotional downsides or negative consequences.

One of which, the survey did address, which was that a fair amount of people felt disappointed in themselves after they overate or ate unhealthy foods in response to stress.

As an eating habit coach, I know that along with disappointment there are also typically feelings of shame and guilt. Sometimes even disgust or frustration. There are of course other negative emotions associated, but these are the ones that are some of the most common.

Where do these emotions come from? They come from thoughts that you have about the circumstance of either overeating or eating an unhealthy food.

These thoughts are judgments about yourself for eating the unhealthy food or for overeating.

Typically, negative thoughts or judgments cause a negative feeling. This is not the case 100% of the time, but it commonly is. I see it a lot.

So, if you felt disappointment in yourself for eating 5 cookies after feeling stressed, what thought do you think caused that feeling?

It may have been something really simple like “I shouldn’t have done that.” It may have been something like, “I was being so good. Now I’ve set myself back.”

It’s just really important being aware that you are feeling that way, the disappointment in your body, is because of a thought that you had in your head.

That’s really great news, because you don’t have to feel badly after something like this occurs because you don’t have to have that particular thought. You have control over your thoughts, even though I know sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

And this is something we would work on if we were working together in 1:1 coaching relationship. These situations come up periodically, sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently, and unless you become aware of your thoughts that cause the feelings in your body, and do things to shift those thoughts, you’ll just keep feeling badly.

I’m going to explain to you shortly why feeling badly, or feeling any negative emotion that doesn’t feel good, will ultimately end up playing a role in your results. And that’s not a good role.

OK, so let’s see what a negative thought that causes a negative feeling would ultimately end up causing.

I’m going to start out with an entirely new circumstance. So let’s just say that you got stuck in traffic, got to work late, and received an e-mail that a meeting that you were not prepared for just got moved up.

And now let’s say that you were experiencing stress in your body. You decide to decrease that stress by eating a 500-calorie sugary muffin that a colleague brought in. Then, you notice after you eat the muffin, that you feel guilty. If you were to describe that feeling of guilt in your body as far as the physical sensations, you would describe it as maybe a tightness in your chest, some tingling, maybe even a pit in your stomach.

What thought do you think might have occurred to cause that feeling of guilt in your body? The muffin itself didn’t cause it. A thought in your own brain caused you to experience those sensations in your body.

An example of a thought that may have caused that feeling of guilt, might be “I shouldn’t have done that. I just set myself back so far.” And I do want to mention here, that our brains tend to be a little bit dramatic.

Oftentimes when they offer us a thought that then generates a negative feeling in our body, the thought Is over-dramatized. And that’s just our human brains being human brains. They can be little drama Queens.

So if you have that thought “I shouldn’t have done that I just set myself back so far”, and that generates the feeling of guilt in your body, that feeling of guilt is going to determine your actions, reactions, or inactions going forward.

In this case, that feeling of guilt could cause lots of different things. It can cause you to sit and stew about eating the muffin, wasting time. It can cause you eat whatever you want for the rest of the day, because you quote already “messed up.”

It can cause you to not find alternative ways to decrease your stress because you’re just sitting around feeling guilty. It can lead to other negative thoughts and feelings, which can certainly then lead to other negative actions and results. Overall though, the negative feeling of guilt is almost always going to cause behaviors that aren’t in line with the results you truly desire.

Because all of those behaviors that I just mentioned are not going to help you to deal with the stress, they’re not going to typically end up resulting in healthy eating habits for the rest of the day, they’re not going to help you feel any better and start fresh for the day.

And then of course you add on those negative physical effects, some of which I mentioned earlier like a feeling of sluggishness or fatigue, also overtime there can be weight gain.

If you are skipping meals due to stress, you can end up having headaches, nausea, weakness, lethargy, among other not so pleasant sensations.

So certainly, how you can decrease the likelihood that stress is going to result in an eating behavior that you really don’t want to be doing, is if you can catch yourself before the eating behavior occurs. That’s wonderful if you can.

Sit with the stress for a moment, close your eyes if you can, take a few slow breaths, until you start to feel some of the stress dissipate.

If you can decrease that discomfort, even by 25 or 50%, you’ll be less likely to go for the food. Or less likely to skip lunch.

This only takes a moment too. So as long as you’re willing to take that pause and do it for a moment you will see results. Then, when you get in the habit of doing this, when you feel any stress your natural reaction will be to then do this, instead of eating.

If you are having trouble catching yourself before the eating behavior, then if it’s after the fact, I recommend checking yourself to see if it’s causing any negative feelings afterward.

Describe that feeling in your body, or at least name the feeling. And then, ask yourself what thought occurred in your head that caused that feeling in your body.

This alone just helps you to see that you have control of that feeling in your body. You don’t even have to do anything with that thought just yet. Just having the awareness and finding the thought is going to be super valuable.

So, work on either of these, or both. These are some of the first steps needed to feel control over your eating habits when experiencing stress.