3 Tips on How to Not Stress Eat
Have you experienced being seated on a couch after a long tiring work week, staring out the horizon while holding a bag of your favourite crisps and just mindlessly munching away with every bite building up to unparalleled comfort, then realizing you’ve just emptied the entire pack in minutes, yet you’re craving for more?
While you’re one among millions of people who also find solstice and innate happiness in crispy truffle chips, silky milk chocolate bars, chunky ice cream pints and decadent cake slices, some just experience this more frequently than others.
Whether it is coined mindless eating, emotional eating or stress eating – the worry is less about rewarding self, but more on the frequent excessive eating as an auto-pilot way of dealing with stress.
Eat on Repeat: Why Do I Stress Eat?
Believe it or not, stress typically suppresses the appetite first. The body naturally does this to allow you to focus on dealing with the stressful situation, releasing a hormone called Epinephrine. But if we fail to address the main cause of stress and it continues to persist, this leads to a release of a hormone called Cortisol.
And yes my friends– this we can easily blame to our bodily function, since once Cortisol is released, this reverses the suppression and greatly increases our appetite that leads to cravings and our desire to eat, on repeat.
Now, try to frame this with the reality of the COVID19 pandemic, including our day-to-day challenges of balancing work from home whilst managing our roles as parents or siblings to support our families– often happening at the same time, in the same space. Or even just the occasional burst of anxieties as most of us have never had to deal with so much uncertainty – ever. Can you imagine the amount of stress that one can be exposed to repeatedly? And then imagine being overwhelmed, and not having to deal with the stressors directly? We see a vicious cycle of unhealthy habits born.
Eat With My Feelings: What Causes Stress Eating?
We stress eat because we are stressed.
So what are the most common stressors to watch out for?
Physical Stress: fatigue from being over-worked, or just not getting 7 hours of sleep daily. Over training at gym is a stressor often under looked.
Emotional Stress: includes anxieties, pressure to meet deadlines and targets, and yes, occasional heart aches included
Social Stress: anything and everything on social media that intoxicates you
Habitual, Hidden Stress: the most difficult ‘stressors’ to identify are ones that are wrapped around coping mechanisms and habits that have been built over a long period of time. Often, we’ve just gotten used to chugging down a bottle of wine on Friday nights to cap the week – without recognising it could be stress-induced, but we often we see it as a way to ‘celebrate’, which is just another depiction of emotional eating.
3 Practical Tips to Stop Stress Eating
1. Be self-aware
Have you been Stress Eating? Start by finding out what your eating patterns and habits are in the last 7 Days. While some may suggest to make a journal, I’d simply recommend you look at what goes into your fridge.
Cortisol often feeds into high sugar and fatty food, so it’s easy to identify which items in your kitchen, your online grocery basket or even e-receipts from food delivery services could be stress induced. While stress eating occurs without us consciously knowing, having a quick scan of what we’ve consumed the past week leaves us with no chance of denying.
Remember that there’s nothing wrong with indulging on your favourites once in a while! But we need to be extra cautious of any recurring pattern – it’s all in the frequency.
Pro-tip: do your online grocery at a full stomach! Appetite levels are suppressed and higher chance of not getting lured by all things sweet and sugary!
2. Measure Stress
How Stressed are you? Thanks to Zilla, you can now measure and quantify stress.
No gadgets needed – just your phone and your fingertip.
And please, don’t even stress about not knowing how to measure it. Or stress about not knowing if you are stressed or not. Instead let your own body signals determine your stress levels. Start building the healthy habit of measuring your daily stress with the Healthzilla App (scroll to the footer for iOS and Android links).
Pro-tip: The fingertip stress scan is best done first thing in the morning, which is great since if Zilla detects that on that particular day you are in high stress, firstly it allows you to reflect on possible stressors and deal with them. Secondly it is a good watch out and warning to keep your hands off anything sugary over lunch or for snacks!
3. Manage Stress Directly
What’s really stressing you out? Are you overworked? Get 7 hours of sleep.
Are you feeling anxious? Jump into regular zoom chats with close family and friends.
Do you feel pressured? Try the quick 2-minute breathing exercises over your lunch breaks.
Stress is reality of life and yes, stressors are here to stay. We just really need to outsmart Cortisol and not eat our feelings away!
Good news, there’s a wide array of hobbies and tools to help us manage stress directly Whether it’s meditation, quiet walks in the park, reading, painting or even use of music as therapy – we all have different ways of coping, all worth giving a shot and experimenting. And the lockdown situation? Definitely not an excuse to prevent anyone from winning over stress eating.
I’ve won my battle against stress eating. Are you ready to claim your own victory?