For other people, stress turns them into emotional eaters who mindlessly munch. Albers says. Those who overeat are attempting to distract themselves with food. Cortisol can make you crave sugary, salty and fatty foods, because your brain thinks it needs fuel to fight whatever threat is causing the stress.
Studies show it can affect your metabolism, too. In one recent study , participants who reported one or more stressors during the previous 24 hours, such as arguments with spouses, disagreements with friends, trouble with children or work-related pressures, burned fewer calories than non-stressed women in the seven hours after eating a high-fat meal.
Did your parents reward good behavior with ice cream, take you out for pizza when you got a good report card, or serve you sweets when you were feeling sad? These habits can often carry over into adulthood. Or your eating may be driven by nostalgia—for cherished memories of grilling burgers in the backyard with your dad or baking and eating cookies with your mom.
Social influences. Getting together with other people for a meal is a great way to relieve stress, but it can also lead to overeating. You may also overeat in social situations out of nervousness. You probably recognized yourself in at least a few of the previous descriptions. One of the best ways to identify the patterns behind your emotional eating is to keep track with a food and mood diary. Every time you overeat or feel compelled to reach for your version of comfort food Kryptonite, take a moment to figure out what triggered the urge.
Write it all down in your food and mood diary: what you ate or wanted to eat , what happened to upset you, how you felt before you ate, what you felt as you were eating, and how you felt afterward. Maybe you always end up gorging yourself after spending time with a critical friend. Once you identify your emotional eating triggers, the next step is identifying healthier ways to feed your feelings.
Diets so often fail because they offer logical nutritional advice which only works if you have conscious control over your eating habits. In order to stop emotional eating, you have to find other ways to fulfill yourself emotionally. You need alternatives to food that you can turn to for emotional fulfillment. Most emotional eaters feel powerless over their food cravings. You feel an almost unbearable tension that demands to be fed, right now! But the truth is that you have more power over your cravings than you think.
Emotional eating tends to be automatic and virtually mindless. Can you put off eating for five minutes? Or just start with one minute. Just tell yourself to wait. How are you feeling? This can help you set yourself up for a different response next time. Allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable emotions can be scary.
To do this you need to become mindful and learn how to stay connected to your moment-to-moment emotional experience. Sign up to get tips for living a healthy lifestyle, with ways to fight inflammation and improve cognitive health , plus the latest advances in preventative medicine, diet and exercise , pain relief, blood pressure and cholesterol management, and more.
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Is a common pain reliever safe during pregnancy? Can vaping help you quit smoking? Staying Healthy Why stress causes people to overeat February 15, Print This Page Click to Print. Staying Healthy. Overeating is closely linked to excess body fat and obesity due to your body being in a calorie surplus. To avoid fat gain, focus on lean proteins and non-starchy vegetables at meals.
Two major hormones affect hunger regulation — ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, and leptin, which suppresses appetite 3.
Eating foods high in fat, salt, or sugar releases feel-good hormones like dopamine, which activate pleasure centers in your brain 4. Over time, your body may associate these pleasure sensations with certain foods, which tend to be high in fat and calories. This process may eventually override hunger regulation, encouraging you to eat for pleasure rather than hunger 5. You can counteract this effect by portioning out certain feel-good foods and eating them at a slower pace to allow your body to register its fullness.
Chronic overeating may override hormones that control fullness and hunger, making it difficult to determine when your body needs food. In turn, this condition has consistently been shown to increase disease risk 6 , 7 , 8. Obesity , which is defined as having a body mass index BMI of 30 or above, is one of the main risk factors for metabolic syndrome. This cluster of conditions raises your chances of heart disease and other health problems, such as diabetes and stroke 9.
Indicators of metabolic syndrome include high levels of fat in your blood, elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance, and inflammation 9. Insulin resistance itself is closely linked to chronic overeating. It develops when excess sugar in your blood reduces the ability of the hormone insulin to store blood sugar in your cells.
If left uncontrolled, insulin resistance may lead to type 2 diabetes. You can reduce your risk of these conditions by avoiding high calorie, processed foods, eating plenty of fiber-rich vegetables, and moderating portions sizes of carbs. Chronic overeating may promote obesity and insulin resistance, two major risk factors for metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that increases your risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
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