Why You Stress Eat + 7 Effective Ways to Relax and De-Stress (Without Eating!)
#SugarBalancedLiving
Whether we've had trouble at work, family responsibilities, or made a big move to another country, stress in our everyday lives usually triggers our most common comfort mechanism: craving junk foods. Nothing hits the spot when we're feeling at our most anxious as indulging in sugar, carb, and generally comforting foods like ice cream and pizza. So why do we do this? And how can we stop comfort and stress eating? That's what we're getting to the bottom of in this blog post!
We all know those days - we get home after a long day, feeling so very weighed down by all the stress of a hard busy day. We respond to this stress by looking insatiably toward the refrigerator and cabinets for something anything sweet like cookies, crunchy like chips or comforting like leftover macaroni cheese.
And the worst part is, we find ourselves easily justifying the cravings by telling ourselves that after this tough day we've had we deserve something satisfying and indulgent to de-stress and help us unwind.
While the snacking and indulging like this may provide you with a boost of happiness, it’s only a short snap of energy, and you’ll find yourself feeling like you need something else to indulge in.
The Comfort Eating Cycle
You keep stuffing yourself and basically binge eating until way past sick point, and even though it does feel wonderful in the moment, now you feel worse than before.
You’ve fed into that negative connection in your brain that food is happiness, increased you chances of building negative eating habits and allowed the problems that occur when you want to use food as your emotional crutch and relief like: slowed your metabolism, weight gain, mood swings and fatigue, increased your cravings for sugar and junk food, etc.
Eating as a self-soothing technique only leads to a negative eating cycle, increasing stress by causing overwhelm, guilt, shame, cravings, etc. and we then turn to eating again for more comfort and relief.
If you identify with any scenario like this… listen, you’re not alone and you certainty aren't crazy. We’ve all been there and overeating is not a way to curb our stress - it can create even more stress in the long run and wreck your body’s health and mental state.
Stress Causes Weight Gain
Researchers have linked weight gain to stress, and according to an American Psychological Association survey, about one-fourth of Americans rate their stress level as 8 or more on a 10-point scale.
This clearly isn’t something we should let keep happening to us… using sugary and junk foods and drinks to help soothe our stress and help us to relax doesn’t work and isn’t healthy for us.
With that said – today I'm going to share with you my tools for de-stressing and curbing my stress levels without becoming overwhelmed by stress-relieving habits and feeling like you’re forced to shove in self-care like a chore. I’ll also cover how you can stop leaning on food for relaxation and mood boosts.
What Is Stress Eating, aka Emotional Eating?
Eating to relieve stress or boost your mood for some may just be an occasional occurrence, like for a birthday or holiday, but, sadly, for many of us it’s an affliction we suffer from a lot.
It’s called stress eating, or for a more all encompassing terminology, it’s called emotional eating – that deep down yearning and need for a large bowl of gooey, yummy, filling macaroni and cheese, followed by a fudge-ey slice of chocolate cake, that’ll heal the wounds of a long, hard, stressful day. Literally nothing else will help… nothing, period.
Or maybe you’ve had a success at work or gone to the gym regularly and you want to reward yourself… you most likely turn to a food item, using it as an emotional reward system.
Emotional eating is a default setting, where we find ourselves reaching for sugary treats and junk foods every time we feel overwhelmed, stressed, bored, tired out in our day to day life, or even excited.
Some days, work or life isn’t so stressful, other days, stress may be profuse and when those anxiety and stress ridden days do occur, then you’re likely using food to self-soothe.
Examples like this include:
Feeling guilty about eating when you’re not hungry, consistently snacking, eating or drinking to relax or calm your nerves, and eating or drinking anything that’s around you just because they are there and you need that sense comfort.
Why Exactly Does Emotional Eating Happen?
Emotional eating (the action of turning to food for comfort) is a method people use to address, ease or hide, both light and intense emotions. Usually the emotions will be negative ones: like anxiety, sadness, stress, grief, loneliness or even a lack of a feeling of control – but interestingly, emotional eating can also be triggered out of happiness or excitement, it just tends to be easier to control in those cases.
This issue is actually instinctive and a very normal reflexive action derived from our collective human experience. It’s in our very psyche and is a literal chemical reaction to associate food with an emotion. An intense emotional feeling causes a drop is some of our body’s chemical neurotransmitters and hormones, which then activates our brain to send messages to our nervous system to make us feel better.
Consuming sugar, processed and junk foods stimulates the release of the mood-boosting neurotransmitter serotonin, a major neurotransmitter known as the “happiness molecule.”
We eat the junk food, and we get a mood boost. What could possibly be wrong with that?
It’s not that simple.
Eating excess junk foods and sugar releases way more serotonin than we need. When these serotonin pathways continue to be activated, our limited store of serotonin will eventually become depleted. After usual abuse, due to decreased levels of serotonin, depression actually starts to form, along with constant blood sugar crash and exhaustion.
In the short term, the boost from sugar is short-lived as it only lasts for an hour or two before you’re hit with serotonin crashes, leaving you over-exerted and groggy.
That’s why when you experience a strong emotional state, you’ll tend to crave high-calorie, processed and high-sugar foods. Some people are more likely to turn to binge eating, others may be more prone to a grazing behavior-- where you constantly eat throughout the day or night — or other emotional eating may manifest into restricting what you eat, to the point of being unhealthy and lacking nutrition.
That feeling of emotional eating also creates a habit and vicious constant cycle of negative eating patterns:
Food crazies of overeating, binge eating, comfort eating, cheat eating and negative food obsessions, which in turn can prevent you from utilizing healthy coping mechanisms and healing methods to approach these emotions.
The plain truth is that unless you honestly address the actual emotions driving the eating, your desire to eat will remain when stressed, often leading to longer-term harm.
How to Relax and De-Stress (Without Eating!)
Stress eating is one of the toughest types of emotional eating and stress is a major cause of overeating, weight gain, and generally many healthy struggles and issues!
Now we know exactly why we keep stress eating and self-soothing with foods.
It’s time for us to learn how to de-stress and curb your stress levels without turning to food, by using easy and effective stress-relieving habits, because if you are trying not to stress eat, you’re going to need something to do instead of turning to food.
I very personally know what it’s like to have it stress, which means I know the sheer importance of being prepared. Figuring out how NOT to overeat when you’re overloaded, tired, overwhelmed, and stressed can seem impossible when all you’re doing is relying on pure willpower. De-stressing in a healthy and effective way is key.
Before we start though… if you find yourself having an exceptionally hard time coping without sugar and junk food. Then you may have a deeper or more ingrained issue and I recommend that you check out my mindset and behavior advice on halting emotional eating over at my blog post: Why You Self-Medicate with Carbs and Sugar + How to Stop It!
Here are 7 ways to de-stress and relax without having to rely on food:
7 Effective Ways to Relax and De-Stress:
1. Distract Yourself
Remove yourself from mundane or stressful situations. Instead of seeing yourself as an active participant in whatever has been stressing or even boring you, try to view yourself as a third party who is stepping away into whatever pleasurable activity you like that will distract your brain. Read a book or listen to music in the park, watch a movie at the cinema, etc.
Whatever you decide to distract yourself with — try to avoid areas that have a negative connotation around them even if only temporarily. Leave the room or the office, going outside is your best bet — but even moving to a different chair will help you get a new mental and physical perspective and release tension.
If you have stress eating habits like going on a coffee run and picking up a cookie or snacking on the candies at reception, do not follow that ritual. You need to shake things up and avoid familiar routines.
My favorite way to distract myself and de-stress is to pop in my earbuds and hit play on Spotify!
According to Duquesne University, music can produce physiological positive reactions, including healthier respiration, pulse, and blood pressure.
2. Reach Out to A Friend
Friendships are the cornerstone of support and the key to dealing with everyday stress.
A social support system (or person) can act as a role model, listener, adviser, and critic, who can offer you reassurance and give you a sympathetic ear and guidance when you feel stressed and lost.
A friendship or some kind of social support system will help you to avoid crashing if you fall and manage stress by providing fun, an ear and companionship. Basically what I’m saying here is, share your struggles, whether you want advice, distraction, or just connection in your time of need – a confidant can make a huge difference.
3. Release The Pressure
Stress is like a pressure cooker… stress forms into tension and anxiety, which, if left unchecked, creates more stress and discomfort. It then builds up inside your body until it manifests in health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.
If stress is pressure and mounts up into toxic symptoms in your body, then we need to acknowledge our stress and find a way to release all that tension, anxiousness and tense thoughts, feelings, and toxic stress triggered behaviors.
Obviously, dealing with what causes the toxic stress - be it situations, work or even relationships - is the best way to release yourself from toxic build up, but, that is a longer journey where you may need guidance and many of us can’t change our life situations right now (or the next hour) because of constrictions such as a job, support or financial pressures - so for now you need let some of it out.
Try to release tension and create comfort in your body in ways that don’t involve eating… escape even for just 60 seconds.
Take a short or long break—even if its just a walk to the bathroom - yell or play loud music in your car, dance, or even scribble on paper.
Allow yourself to vent.
If you feel like you’re ready to deep dive into solving stress, anxiety, and the burnout causing your stress and emotional eating tendencies (perhaps coming from your relationships, work, money, health, or from events or traumas from your past that have you caught in a stress loop, zapping your energy and keeping you stuck), then it’s time for you to take action to resolve them.
If you are able to you could also try something more physical like exercise, yoga, tai chi, acupuncture or getting a massage is a great activity for stress relief.
I personally having been hitting HASfit Youtube channel because they have such a huge selection of different types of exercise and different lengths, and come across and down to earth, nice people. I also do Bikram in front of the TV without the heat. My two favorites are Dr Espen Hjalmby 60 min Hot Yoga Class + Guided Meditation, and then 30 Minute Hot 26 Yoga Class – Hot Yoga Asheville for a great overall stretch, and the feeling of stillness and calm in mind.
4. Journaling
Untangle and decompress your feelings by writing for five to ten minutes a day, especially before you eat. Journaling can reduce stress by helping one get rid of negative thoughts and will help you to avoid overeating and help you reduce your chances of eating when not hungry.
Use your journal track your feelings and use those words for stress awareness and to analyze your situation in a more positive way.
However, you’re in the early stages of tackling your emotional eating so you may not quite authentically understand yourself yet. I recommended also keeping a food diary in your journal for at least 7 days, writing down what you eat and how you felt at the time. Keeping a journal allows you to see your patterns.
As you go back through what you’ve written, you’ll notice certain things keep coming up.
Identify those behaviors, and what is triggering you to reach into the refrigerator or the pantry and to start mindlessly eating, and you can then start the work of healing those emotions.
5. Breathe
Literally the best way to relax or calm down quickly when you can’t remove yourself from the overwhelming situation, is to do a deep breathing exercise.
Even if it’s just a by a small amount, you can reverse that negative cycle of stress build up just by breathing.
This technique is the easiest and one of the most effective deep breathing techniques to do when you’re suffering from overwhelm and can’t focus:
• Steadily inhale through your nose, counting to four.
• Hold that breath, for another four.
• Exhale slowly and steadily through your mouth, for four seconds.
• Repeat this routine for a continuous 2 minutes at least.
I recommended practicing this breathing technique while you’re in a calm state to help you tap into this breathing routine easier when you’re in an anxious mindset.
6. Get Enough Sleep
Stress is exhausting and tiredness causes stress… making for a viscous stress cycle. Trust me sleep is more important than working late into the night or binging Netflix all night.
Sleep is vital to helping you quash those stress and emotional eating urges.
While you’re probably looking to get between 7-9 hours as an adult between the ages of 18 to 64, even a single night of sleeping only four to six hours can impact your ability to think clearly the next day, making you more susceptible to making decisions that aren’t in your best interests.
There are literally so many terrible consequences of getting insufficient sleep which you can read about in my post here. But, the point here is that you’re going to make your task of combating your stress and emotional eating problems much harder without taking your sleep seriously.
7. Mindful Activities
Using meditations and breathing exercises, both as a consistent weekly practice to reprogram those negative stress and emotional eating episodes and urges in general, and also, doing them specifically when you have an intense compulsion come over you in order to curb and inhibit them are two incredibly effective techniques.
When an impulse is triggered, carrying out a meditation, and (or), some simple breathing techniques is the quickest way to send the firm command to your body’s stress signals: ‘NO.’
This simple, and easy, method, essentially works by outsmarting your reptilian brain-- which is urging us to eat out of emotion.
Again, tie this in with the first two actions and instead of judging your emotions or running on autopilot, observe what you’re feeling and acknowledge them. You can write it down in your private journal to relieve stress. Speaking (or calling) with close friends also helps.
Enjoy Relaxing and De-Stressing Without Food!
While there always seems to be something therapeutic and soothing about mindlessly indulging in comfort food, be it at the desk or after work, ingraining those patterns and feeding into that negative eating habit can kick off a whole host of issues and struggles for both your mind and body.
By using these actionable tips and tricks you can start creating more effective relaxation techniques and start eating intentionally instead of stress eating.
And take note that the key to success in ending emotional eating and learning to intuitively de-stress in a healthy way, is to identify the tools that work best for you. This isn’t one size fits all - there are multiple tools here. So take time to play around with these strategies and start collecting your own.
When the tough moments hit and you reach for the vending machine, remind yourself of these problems that occur when you want to use food as your stress relief: it increases your chances of negative eating habits and allowed problems that occur when you want to use food as your emotional crutch and relief like: slowed your metabolism, weight gain, mood swings and fatigue, increased your cravings for sugar and junk food, etc.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want any of these struggles and would prefer to be living my happiest and healthiest lifestyle possible without deprivation!
Today, we will get out of our comfort zone, and breakout of destructive but predictable habits.
Take those active steps right now to tackle emotional eating and work to find new healthy habits and steps to manage stress, and don't give up if you slip or trip. It's hard to stop emotional eating, so when you trip up, forgive yourself and start over again.
At first it may be quite hard to start cutting out sugar - especially with sugary or carb-y pasta cravings - but once you’ve started decreasing sugar for a few weeks, you will notice the decreased cravings, and will be really surprised at just how much better you feel.
I’m evidence of this, I used to be a sugar addict!
Sometimes it’s harder for some rather than others when it comes sugar cravings… so if you need extra help don’t worry, I’ve got you covered!
… yup, the Isabelle behind the IsabelleMcKenzie.com!
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I’m dedicated to helping teach people how to live their happiest, healthiest life and reach their goals so that they can create the lifestyle of their dreams with integrity & purpose.
I focus on self-care, mind, body and health, dedicated to helping teach peeps how to live their happiest, healthiest life and reach their goals so that they can create the life that will have them jumping out of their bed in the morning to actually live!
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