Whether you are actively trying to lose weight, or just be more mindful of your health, here are 3 ways you can curb your mindless stress eating.
What is Stress Eating?
Harvard health defines stress eating as the phenomenon where your body copes with physical or emotional distress by increasing your appetite, causing you to crave high fat and sugar foods. When you're stressed out, your body will experience an uptick in cortisol levels—cortisol being the stress hormone. This makes it so that you start craving food that is usually high in fat and sugar, because these are "comfort" foods that can help dampen your stress levels.
If you are trying to lose weight, this can stop you from reaching your goals, and even if you're not, over eating these junk foods can cause stomach upset and other health problems.
As a college student, I am all too familiar with the uncontrollable urge to binge eat my way through my cabinets and fridge when times get stressful. Especially around deadlines for large projects, midterms, and finals. But, as someone who has been invested in fitness through nutrition and strength training for many years now, I've had to learn these coping strategies through trial and error. In sharing these with you, I hope that you can employ some of them to control your stress eating.
1. Address the Stress
Let's get to the root of the problem— the stress. Taking efforts to effectively bash some of this stress can help you mitigate the need to stress eat.
You are likely familiar with some of the often touted ways to de-stress. Meditation is helpful for many people, but if you can't spare the time or mental concentration, simply use the google breathing exercise feature! Search up "deep breathing" and a guided exercise will come up. This has helped me during exams.
Another great way to destress is to get outside and take a walk, get up and stretch, and just move your body in any way. Personally, if I take a bit of time each day to slow down (really, just 5-10 minutes will not hurt you) and take a walk or exercise a little, it can go a long way towards resetting my mind and getting me refreshed to achieve the tasks I need to accomplish.
2. Check Yourself before You Wreck Yourself
If you're here, I'm going to make the assumption that you are aware you have this problem. This is good. While you are aware of it before it hits, and if you know there's a period of time coming up where you'll be especially stressed at work, school, or in life, be proactive!
Make it hard for your future self to have access to foods you know you're susceptible too. This means not keeping junk food around the house or deleting that food delivery app. After all, it is considerably harder to stress eat junk when there is no junk.
3. Fuel Yourself Right
Stress takes a lot of brain power and is taxing on your body. If you find that you are physically hungry and not just bored or stress eating, eat! But be mindful of what it is you are eating and when.
For one, make sure to disperse your meals throughout the day so you aren't finding yourself starving between meals. Make sure not to skip meals.
Eat volume foods like veggies and fruits that are packed with fiber to keep you full, and get your protein intake to stay satiated (protein is the macronutrient with the highest satiety index score!) A killer combination of fiber, fats, and protein will keep you full and satisfied for longer than a meal with empty carbs and high fats.
And that is pretty much how I go about conquering my stress eating.
Hopefully these can help you avoid the brunt of your experiences with it. If you enjoyed reading this post please feel free to leave me a comment with your thoughts and feedback, like, and follow.
