Because so many regular life conditions produce the stress and anxiety that leads to overeating, stress is a common trigger for emotional eaters.When learning how to stop stress eating,we need to know, some stressors are internal.
Such as the pressure you put on yourself to be perfect or the nervousness you experience when you want to ask for a raise or approach a friend or family member about an issue.
How To Stop Stress Eating – Pressures Are The Cause Of Stress Eating
Other pressures come from outside of yourself, such as job demands, medical concerns, family responsibilities, and peer pressure. Some pressures are under your control, while others are beyond your power.
Purchasing a home, marrying, and having a child are all joyous occasions, but they are also stressful since they include change, and change always introduces new and frequently anxiety-provoking difficulties into your life.
As a result, emotional overeating can occur in both happy and unfavourable situations.
And what meals do the majority of individuals eat when they’re stressed? You’ve probably had enough personal experience to know that when tensions build, emotional overeaters desire comfort foods—those that emotionally transport us back to a more carefree time of childhood and are generally high in sugar, fat, or both.
Which may explain why psychological stress and “reward eating,” which is defined as a lack of control over the types and amount of food consumed, are two of the most common barriers to weight loss.
How To Stop Stress Eating – Is Hunger Caused by Stress?
Food has both physical and psychological effects on you. The types of foods you eat, your eating behaviour or habits, and how your body responds biologically to your diet all influence your physical relationship with food.
How you think about food, how you use food for purposes other than hunger, and how food relates to your body image, or how you feel about how you appear, are all factors in your psychological, or emotional, relationship with food.
You eat to satisfy actual hunger, to meet a physiological requirement to consume and survive. When you stress-eat, for example, you eat to fulfil your hunger or a craving for a specific sort of food because you feel it will give comfort.
That’s a psychological or emotional urge that has little to do with physical hunger. Emotional hunger is a natural reaction to intense sentiments and emotions.
If you’re hungry and anxious at the same time,you may well be eating to fulfil actual hunger.However, because you aren’t aiming to eat healthily at the time, you may choose fast food or a sweet dessert over something more nutritious.
Consistent stress generates increased and continued production of a hormone called cortisol into the bloodstream, and high blood cortisol levels are connected to increased appetite.
Obese women’s stress-related cortisol levels were shown to be considerably greater than women of a healthier weight, albeit this association does not always lead to overeating.
5 Techniques for Dealing with Stress Eating
You must control your stress levels in order to overcome stress eating. The best method to cope with stress is to confront it head-on while also learning how to deal with stressful circumstances in the future before the problem and your eating habits spiral out of control.
You may handle stress and avoid stress eating by following these five steps:
#1 Be aware of your stressors
Determine the events and emotions that cause you to overeat when you’re stressed. These are your emotional eating triggers, and once you’ve identified them, you may take steps to prevent them or at the very least be prepared.
#2 Exercise can help you relax.
You’ll be more immune to the impacts of stress if you’re physically fit. Exercise creates chemical changes in the brain that lower stress, but stress can also hinder some people from taking activities that could improve their mental and physical health, such as exercising.
If your personal circumstances make going to the gym or even doing formal workouts at home impossible, try increasing the amount of walking, gardening, cleaning, and other lighter forms of movement and exercise you undertake on a daily basis.
#3 Make a request for assistance
Talk to close friends and family about your thoughts and harmful stress responses so you can obtain the help you need to get through difficult situations. If you frequently feel guilty, shamed, or regretful about your eating habits, you should get professional help.
#4 Develop a mindfulness practise
Meditation, yoga, tai chi, and other mindfulness-based exercises and programmes aid in mind and body relaxation. You are better equipped to make smarter and healthier lifestyle choices when you are mindful, calm, and focused.
Mindful eating is a type of mindfulness that involves slowing down and paying more attention to what and how you eat.
#5 Learn intuitive eating
A complementary technique to mindful eating created by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in the 1990s and still advised by nutrition experts today.Paying closer attention to the natural, internal hunger and fullness signals communicated between your brain and your gut is what intuitive eating is all about.
These cues assist you in deciding when, what, and how much to eat. It’s also about being able to trust such indications. Unless you have dietary limitations, if you understand and trust your own natural eating cues, you can give yourself permission to indulge in a need for chocolate cake just as easily as you can give yourself permission to eat veggies, without guilt or shame.
You’ll know when it’s time to say “enough!” instinctively. You make your decision based on hunger and the appeal of particular foods at specific times, not on how anxious or emotional you are at the time.
Eating intuitively empowers you to discover what your body feels like when you are actually hungry vs hunger driven by stress or the need for emotional consolation.You’ll have a better knowledge of how to control stress-eating if you understand and pay attention to the ‘why’s’ of what your body is seeking.”
