A friend posted this on Facebook: “I can’t stop eating!” My first thought? Well of course, that’s so very natural. I read the many comments and, as we would all expect, she is not alone. This whole novel Coronavirus situation has been extremely stressful, so of course people are stress eating.
Why do we stress eat? Before my 50 pound weight loss over 20 years ago, I thought I couldn’t control my eating and that it was because I was weak or genetically condemned. During those years of failed dieting, as I was plagued by hopelessness, self-hatred and body shame, I wish someone had told my what I am about to tell you.
It’s evolutionary, my dear. Willpower and dieting don’t work. They go against our nature. In this article, I will give you 9 reasons why we stress eat. Then, I will offer 10 doable strategies to work with, and not against, your evolutionary biology. It is my intention to help you redirect your love of food from destructive pleasure to shameless healthy pleasure, using this time of heightened global COVID-19 stress as a portal to new possibility.
I ask for this in return: be as patient and loving with yourself as you possibly can. The world needs more kindness, not less, and it starts within.
9 reasons stress leads to impulsive eating:
1) Our bodies can interprets chronic heightened stress as famine.
Your lower, more primal, brain senses your stress and is wired to protect you from attack via fight, flight or freeze. When you feel stressed, these parts of your brain are also wired to protect you from famine with unconscious directives to stockpile, eat and eat some more. This is part of why many people are stockpiling in excess as a reaction to the novel coronavirus pandemic, even where there is no food shortage other than the ones caused by stockpiling.
There are those who stockpile and don’t eat. Stress can also turn off appetite as well. Whether your reaction to stress is to store food in your pantry or as body fat is really just a matter of internal or external storage.
2) Stress makes us crave sugar and simple carbs via stress hormones and insulin.
When your primitive brain feels stress, your body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline regardless of whether you are actually under attack or in a state of true scarcity. This triggers insulin, a fat storage and blood sugar regulating hormone. High insulin tends to make you crave simple carbohydrates (and store fat). Your body means well. It’s trying to protect you! So, it drives you to eat, simple carbs in particular.
3) Our bodies may be trying to boost our moods.
When we are stressed for longer periods of time, we also deplete brain chemicals, called neurotransmitters, that help us feel calm, happy and hopeful, such as GABA, serotonin and dopamine. What’s a survival brain to do to try to boost your mood? You guessed it. Eat!
4) Many of us unconsciously eat to avoid feeling unpleasant emotions.
When we are in fight or flight, one “flight” strategy is to avoid and stuff down negative emotions instead of feeling them. It is very common for people to hold an unconscious misconception that if we feel pain, we will go down a rabbit hole and never come back. However, the opposite is true. Your body needs to sense that you have fully felt pain and fear signals for these signals to lessen. We call this “feel your way free.” When we don’t stop to feel and release, then we stuff – our emotions and, yes once again, our mouths. We eat our emotions to numb our pain.
5) We eat more when we don’t register pleasure from our food or do not have enough pleasure in our lives.
We are wired for pleasure. It is a biological need and not a luxury. If we eat while preoccupied and don’t consciously register that we ate and relished something yummy, guess what your brain tells you? “I don’t really remember eating. Uh, yeah, I don’t think we ate. Time to eat!” Or, when we eat too fast, “Wow, that was over fast. I barely had a chance to enjoy that and it was over. Let’s do it some more!” So, you eat.
Along similar lines, we often have a drive to get pleasure from food when we aren’t getting pleasure in other areas of our life. This is why in order to have control over eating, we must make time for a broad spectrum of healthy forms of pleasure and play as close to every day as possible. Examples include socialization, touch (from others, pets or even yourself), time outdoors, forms of movement you enjoy, books, movies, music and so forth, basically anything that you enjoy that doesn’t hurt you.
6) When we eat while stressed, we tend not to absorb complex nutrients as well, which can lead us to overeat.
Why? When we are in a stressed state, our body prepares for fight or flight by slowing our digestion (as well as hampering our libido and ability to fight infections). This is so you can direct energy to run fast or defend yourself. Because of this, when we are stressed, we are not able to assimilate more complex nutrients, so our bodies eat more, but feel less nourished. So, we eat more and feed the cycle.
The opposite is also true. Calm, present, pleasurable eating helps us get more complete nutritional benefit from our foods so we get full eating less and absorb more nutrients.
7) Carbohydrates generally don’t make us feel full and we often don’t eat enough of these nutrients that do.
Another thing that is helpful to know is what makes us feel full. Lower fiber carbohydrates, particularly simple carbs like sugars and flours, don’t make us feel full, but good quality fats and proteins do. Non starchy veggies also help us feel full. So, you can eat a whole lot of chips, desserts and popcorn without feeling full. However, how many boiled eggs can you eat unless you’re Cool Hand Luke (that’s a classic movie reference for you youngin’s)?
Carbohydrates are not bad! Let me say this again: carbohydrates are not bad. We just need to eat high quality ones in moderation and in balance with other nutrients like proteins, fats and non-starchy veggies. We need to keep our blood sugar balanced to keep our cells healthy and age gently. This includes choosing high nutrient carbohydrates like organic root veggies, squash and fruits. This allows us to be a little more moderate in our consumption of grains, flours and pastas (ideally gluten free for most people), which aren’t bad either if they are high quality. Similarly, desserts are great when made with good ingredients and in resonable portions. Remember, desserts with more fat and protein are more filling!
8) If we don’t get our nutritonal needs yet, we feel hungry no matter how many calories we eat. We can be overweight and malnourished.
When foods are higher in nutrients, such as organic veggies grown in rich soil or wild game or pastured meat, we don’t need to eat much to feel full. A fast food salad with anemic veggies and factory farm chicken is not as filling because its not as nutrient rich as its sustainable counterpart – as above, so below (or as below, so above). Empty calories keep us hungry because your nutritonal needs simply aren’t met and it is your body’s duty to ask for more food – real food this time, please. Furthermore, when we deprive our body of nutrients, our bodies get stresssed and you are back in the stress eating biochemistry described a the beginning of this article. With some exceptions, a large percentage of obese folks are malnourished, not overnourished.
9) Willpower is a joke
So, why can’t we just override these programs with logic? Why doesn’t willpower work? Logic can play a part, but only if it is not hijacked by our lower brain. Remember, stress eating directives come from the lower, more primitive parts of the brain, such as the brain stem and the limbic system. Because impulsive behaviors are meant to protect us with lightening speed, they signal us faster than logic or wisdom, which is why we sometimes have to “bite our tongue” while we wait to find a more mature response and why, when we don’t, we can make a mess of things.
When we are under stress, we have much less access to impulse control as logic and “willpower” are more likely to go out the window. Why? The part of our brain that is focused on “me, now, safe, feel good” takes over and concern for the long term implications of a decision fade from reach. This part of your brain doesn’t care if something you are doing will make you gain weight, give you cancer, ruin a relationship, give you a hangover or weaken your immune system (yes, even when there’s a viral pandemic). Those concepts are too abstract and in the future for the primal brain.
Now that you understand, you are empowered to have more options!
Hopefully it is now clearer why, with so much processed food, subsidized carbohydrates and stress in our modern culture, we have so much obesity, accelerated aging and chronic illness. Add a viral pandemic and you have one of two choices. You can feed a downward spiral of self-destructive despair or you can choose to use this as a unique opportunity to do something different. You can cultivate an upper spiral for yourself.
How might you create an upper spiral, you may be asking? I hope you are!
First, release your cravings from the shackles of shame. It’s natural to want to eat more during a stressful time and it is healthy to eat, just as long we eat balanced meals made of nourshing foods we evolved to eat. For example, one of my clients told me the other day that since she’s been eating homemade, balanced, delcious meals, she has felt full while losing weight. She also feels more energized and emotionally balanced. That always makes my day. She’s experiencing pleasure and health. My business partner Skya Boudousquié and I call that healthy hedonism.
It is equally important that we are expereincing the pleasure we are wired to crave, not only from our food, but in our lives more generally. The best way to deal with the lower brain so you can regain control of your life is to soothe yourself, give your body balanced nutriton as well as prioritize more pleasure and play so your brain knows it is safe to turn off eating hyperdrive.
10 Healthy Hedonism strategies for upgrading your relationsip with hunger signals
- Practice damage control: Stock up on “good junk food,” such as organic whole food snacks from online vendors or the health food store so that if the junky monkey takes over, not so much damage is done.
- Eat more quality protein and fat to feel full, both in your meals and in your snacking. Make sure the fats you eat are mostly unrefined or “virgin” oils as well as fats from organic plants and healthy, humanely treated animals, ideally pastured and wild. Remember that eating stressed animals increses our biological stress via hormones in their tissues.
- Crowd out crappy carbs with nourishing ones, like root veggies, winter squash and fruits (and more non-starchy veggies, which you can look up on the internet if you’re not sure what those are).
- Cook homemade meals ahead so you always have the option to eat a real meal. Having meals made ahead increases likelihood you will eat them instead.
- Ground when you eat by literally eating outside, on the earth if you can. This literally has a calming effect on your body via electron transfer with your molecules. Fresh air is also soothing.
- Replace all-day grazing with structured meal times where you put everything you’re eating out in front of you so you can see it. Consider eating dinner 2 to 3 hours before you sleep. This helps you see what you are actually eating and gives you digestive rest between meals, which is part of how your body repairs itself.
- Shift from zoned out zombie eating to embodied pleasure eating. Chew, taste and feel the sensations in your body when you eat. Malke sure your food is yummy using pure ingredients and that you fully register the pleasure of it. Make sure you notice how vibrant or yucky you feel after meals as well. This tells you how well what you ate served you.
- Feel your way free! Be curious about the sensations in your body. Beyond tasting your food, make sure you are stopping to feel all of the emotions coming up throughout the day so that they can move through you instead of staying stuck in the forms of bodily discomfort and looping negative thoughts that lead to numbing with food.
- Reframe your thinking habits around this whole Coronavirus thing. What are the good things that are happening in your life and on the planet? What new opportunities for growth and conneciton are showing up? What can you do with this time to feel upgraded and not devastated on the other end of it? Focus on what you can do so this isn’t happening “to you.”
- Actively seek healthy pleasures! Meditate, do yoga, play, dance around your house, go on a walk or hike, move in creative fun ways, video call people you love… Crowd out worry and fear with anything that brings you calm or sparks joy. This will help reset your nervous sytem to replace survival mode with thriving mode.
Take these one at a time starting with what feels most doable then moving to the next and so on. Be gentle with yourself. Focus more on curiousty and exploration than getting it “right” or being “perfect.”
Enjoy this window to shamelessly indulge in delicious, nourishing foods! It’s not only healthy to enjoy eating, it is a biological necessity to do so, as long as it is in a way that works with and not against nature, because, after all, you are a part of nature.
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