Stress is a physical or emotional response to a demanding or challenging situation. Your body is designed to adapt to short-term stress; it can even help you make a decision or motivate you to be more productive. But chronic, unrelenting stress can seriously affect your health and daily behaviors, including when and what food you eat.
Also called emotional eating, stress eating usually has little to do with actual hunger. Instead, it centers around emotions. It’s a way to deal with uncomfortable feelings, but it can undermine your efforts to feel good in your body (or stall weight loss if this is your goal).
Stress eating usually centers around highly palatable or comfort foods that are sweet, salty, and high-fat. These foods may provide temporary pleasure but don’t make us feel better long-term. It’s common to feel like stress eating is running your life, but change is possible. Here’s how to have self-control with food.
How Does Stress Affect Your Appetite?
Stress can impact your appetite in two ways. For some people, high stress means lower appetite. Think about that feeling of butterflies you might get before public speaking or a job interview. Losing your appetite or feeling sick when your body is in “fight or flight” mode is normal. But anxiety and appetite suppression is usually associated with acute or short-term stress.
On the other hand, increased appetite is more common under chronic stress. But does stress actually make you hungry? Stress eating isn’t necessarily due to true hunger (meaning you haven’t had enough calories to sustain your energy levels), but it may feel like this is the case.
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How Can Stress Make Us Eat More?
Cortisol, the primary stress hormone released in response to stress, can increase appetite. 1 This is your body’s way of ensuring you have enough energy to deal with the “danger” it perceives. Unfortunately, cortisol raises blood sugar and tells the body to hang onto weight.
Conversely, emotional eating isn’t necessarily about appetite but about filling an emotional void. Consider how often we use food to respond to something difficult in life, even starting in childhood.
Many kids are given treats like ice cream after a hard day at school or a lollipop after a doctor’s appointment. It’s not that treating ourselves to a food we enjoy is inherently a “bad” thing. However, the timing of these treats can cause our brains to normalize using food to cope with hard life situations.
Pleasure signals from food can also make you experience positive emotions, at least temporarily. According to some studies, sugar, salt, and fat are the pleasure-reward trifecta for your brain, and they can light up the same reward centers as drugs. When you regularly consume foods with sugar, the body also releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked with pleasure.
How To Recognize Stress Eating
Physical hunger includes physiological symptoms like dizziness, hunger pains, feeling faint, or moody. In most cases, you’ll eat anything if you’re starving, even if it’s not your favorite.
Emotional hunger is different as it’s not usually accompanied by physiological hunger signs. Instead, stress eating is usually accompanied by anxiety, sadness, anger, depression, or boredom. Food is used to fill a void rather than satisfy an actual need for energy intake.
Stress eating symptoms can include:
- Cravings for a particular type of food (usually a treat).
- Food is a comfort you are drawn to when things feel hard.
- You eat the food rapidly, maybe hardly tasting it.
- You know you aren’t hungry but still want something.
- You think about food as something you “deserve” after a hard day.
Stress eating can also become a compensatory behavior that does not address the root causes of your emotions or what is happening in your brain.
If you are consistently turning to food in these situations, you will not be able to explore other coping mechanisms that could help your manage and eliminate stress. Don’t know where to start? Let’s dive into actionable tips that you can use now to transition away from stress eating.
How to Stop Stress Eating: 13 Proven Tips
Learn More About Mindful Eating with Signos’ Expert Advice
Kindness and self-compassion are two essential tools for overcoming emotional eating. Examining triggers can be difficult and even painful if you struggle with stress eating. These aren’t habits that change overnight, but you can regain control of food with consistent effort.
Taking the necessary steps to understand how stress impacts your eating habits may feel daunting, but it pays off long-term. One way to stay in touch with how food affects your body is by using the Signos app with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM).
A CGM is a powerful tool that constantly measures your blood sugar to see how food, stress, exercise, and daily life impact your metabolic health. Using a CGM with personalized feedback from the Signos app can motivate you to make healthy choices. You can find out if Signos is a good fit for you by taking a quick quiz here.
Interested in learning more about nutrition and healthy habits? Visit the Signos blog.
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