Stress Eating: What It Is and How to Combat It

Stress eating, also known as emotional eating, is using food to help you cope with difficult emotions, manage stress, or fill a void within you that you don’t know how to fill. It is eating to fill your emotional needs rather than satisfy physical hunger and nourish your body.

Stress eating can lead you to overeat and/or binge on high-calorie, sweet, and fatty foods that are detrimental to your health and sabotage weight-loss efforts if you are trying to lose.

Key Difference Between Physical and Emotional Hunger

Biological need versus emotional discomfort Physical hunger is a natural, biological response to the body’s need for nutrients and fuel to enable it to keep going. Emotional hunger, on the other hand, is triggered by how you feel rather than by your body’s physical needs and is an attempt to use food to cope with emotional issues, manage stress, soothe, comfort, relax, or numb.

Physical sensations versus emotional triggers Physical hunger is an involuntary sensation triggered by a low energy state and the secretion of hunger hormones. Your brain uses physical signs such as a growling stomach, headache, difficulty concentrating, shakiness, lightheadedness, and/or weakness to communicate your body’s need for food.

Emotional hunger, on the other hand, is triggered by emotional cues such as stress, sadness, boredom, loneliness, frustration, or even happiness.

Gradual versus sudden Physical hunger tends to come on gradually and increase as your body continues to go without food. Emotional hunger, on the other hand, presents as an intense desire to eat something immediately, even if you have already eaten and are no longer physically hungry.

Can wait, if necessary, versus immediate gratification With physical hunger, you can ignore the initial signs if you are busy with other things. Emotional hunger, on the other hand, demands instant gratification.

Open to food options versus specific cravings With physical hunger, your focus is on getting something to eat. You are not fussy about the kind of food and are open to options. Emotional hunger, on the other hand, presents as an intense craving for a specific food, typically high in fat, sugar, or sodium.

Satisfied with food versus can’t be satisfied with food Physical hunger is satisfied when you eat and will go away when you are full. Emotional hunger, on the other hand, cannot be satisfied with food, which can lead to mindless eating.

How Stress Affects Appetite

Studies have shown that in addition to affecting you psychologically and emotionally, stress can also have physiological effects as your adrenal glands release the stress hormone, cortisol, into your system to help your body protect itself. If the levels of cortisol stay elevated over a prolonged period of time, it can increase your appetite and lead to greater food consumption and weight gain.

High levels of cortisol can also affect your food preferences and trigger cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods that give you a temporary burst of energy and momentary pleasure.

Stress Eating and the Mood-Food Cycle

The cycle begins with an emotional trigger that causes you to feel distressed or overwhelmed. Your emotions are so tied to food that your automatic reaction is to reach for something to eat, often consuming whatever is convenient, even if it’s something you don’t particularly enjoy. Or you may look for something to eat as a distraction to put off doing something you don’t want to do or keep you from facing a situation you don’t want to face. Either way, the result is the same.

Eating may feel good at the moment, but the calming effect of the food is only temporary, and more often than not, you will feel worse later on, as it does not address the issue or fix the problem, and the feelings that triggered you are still there.

The emotions you were trying to mask return; you feel frustrated, guilty, and/or ashamed, and beat yourself up; the ensuing negative feelings you have about yourself trigger you to turn to food again for comfort; and the cycle begins all over again

Tips To Help You Combat Stress Eating

Consider these steps you can take to regain control over your cravings and stop stress eating whenever you feel triggered by uncomfortable emotions.

Be mindful Learn to distinguish emotional hunger from true physical hunger, and be aware of what you are eating and when. This can help you stop mindlessly eating certain things at certain times just out of habit or boredom.

Journal Keeping a mood and food diary in which you keep track of when you eat, what you eat, how much you eat, what you are feeling, and how hungry you are can help you identify triggers as well as eating patterns and connections between your emotions and food.

Identify your triggers Take note of the things that set you off. Whenever you feel the urge for comfort food, stop and take a moment to think of what feeling, person, place, or event is triggering it and what you want to eat, and write it down in your food and mood diary.

If you did eat, record what happened to upset you, what you ate, and how you felt before, after, and while you were eating it.

Pause and check your hunger reality Stress eating tends to be automatic and mindless. Before giving in to a craving, pause and check your hunger level to see if you really are hungry or if your craving might be related to an emotional issue instead.

Wait a few minutes to give the craving time to pass and do something to distract yourself, such as taking a short walk, writing in your journal, or calling a friend.

Plan ahead If you are feeling stressed or upset, postpone your trip to the grocery store. Remove triggering foods from your home and replace them with foods you enjoy but which don’t cause you to feel out of control when you eat them. If you know a difficult or stressful time is coming up, plan ahead by having healthy snacks on hand you can reach for instead of high-fat, sugary comfort foods.

Find other ways to feed your emotional hunger To stop stress eating, you need to redirect your attention to alternatives to food you can turn to for emotional fulfillment. If, for instance, you feel depressed or lonely, call a friend, listen to some praise and worship music, do a puzzle, or play with a pet.

If you feel angry, frustrated, or stressed, take a short walk in nature to clear your head, do some deep breathing to release the tension from your body, or engage in some form of aerobic activity like dancing, exercising, or scrubbing the floor.

Fight boredom Instead of snacking when you are not hungry, find something healthier to do, such as engaging in a creative activity or hobby, watching a movie, listening to a podcast, or reading a good book.

Learn from setbacks If you do slip up and have an episode of stress eating, forgive yourself and start fresh. Try to learn from the setbacks and make a plan for how you can prevent it from happening again the next time you are triggered.

Join a support group Support groups are a safe space in which you can connect with others who have similar issues, support and encourage one another, and learn from each other’s experiences.

Pray Pray for God to help you, and seek Him for wisdom and strength to cope with your daily challenges, rather than trying to bury them with food.

Consider therapy A trained mental health professional can help you uncover and address what lies at the roots of your stress eating, as well as help you learn how to change your eating habits and find better ways of dealing with uncomfortable emotions than trying to use food to do so.

If you have questions about this article on stress eating or need more help than it could provide, please contact us today.