Stressed Spelled Backwards is Desserts!
Years ago I came across one of those kitschy post-it note pads that declared “STRESSED SPELLED BACKWARDS IS DESSERTS!” and the adage has been stuck in my head ever since. However, there’s a deeper connection between stress and our favorite comfort foods that goes beyond a palindrome word game. The majority of my clients tell me that when they are stressed, they eat. There truly is a well trained emotional and physical balance between stress and the desire to plow through an entire carton’s of Edy’s Slow Churned. Under stress, your body pumps out cortisol as part of its natural “fight or flight” response to such threats. In chronic stress situations, however, the body no longer responds to the natural signals that tell it to shut down cortisol production. One of the jobs of cortisol is to replenish the energy that would have been used in our fight or flight response (say, to run away from that saber tooth tiger in our caveman days) and thus, hunger is spiked. Cortisol is also responsible for ushering all the excess energy being taken in through Edy’s, oreos and wheat thins and guide them straight to storage in the abdomen area. Helpful when you’ve just run 4 miles to get away from that saber tooth, but not so helpful when the source of your stress is ongoing and usually involves you being pinned to your desk chair, driving around like a chauffeur or vegging out in a near-coma in front of The Office reruns as you try to forget your office drama. Now we’ve got elevated hungry, cravings for quick energy (hello, sugar!), and quick and easy storage of that extra energy.
So, where does this leave us? Helpless to cream puff cravings when your boss is cracking the whip? Having to accept that the moment your daughter says “Mommy, there’s this boy…”, you’re destined to increase a pants size? Hardly! The good news is that while these physiological pathways do exist and can help relieve us of some of our “why can’t I just get my act together” guilt, there is a very strong psychological aspect of stress eating that we evolved humans can do something about. A strong part of this chain is the learned behavior. Under stress, your body responds as it has since its caveman days. We respond as we have since our childhood days – by using food as a comfort and an automatic response to these triggers. Do this enough times (say, the course of a few decades) and we’ve become the proverbial Pavlovian dogs to our pantries and freezers.
Want to free yourself of the response overall? For years I worked with clients (and myself) on finding “replacement activities” when it came to eating as a response to stress. While other activities – exercise, yoga, meditation, laughter, reading, hot baths, and even sex – can act to reduce stress (and consequently, diminish cortisol levels), like food they are still a balm to a sore. Crank that stress up high enough and it’s hard to remember that downward facing dog might be a better response than double chocolate moose tracks.
Then one day it occurred to me – why didn’t we go straight to the root of the problem? Eliminate or reduce the stress.
Sound too good to be true? “I can’t help but be stressed – my job brings it on!” “Being a parent means being stressed – there’s no way around it.” I got to thinking as I explored this route – which came first? Are the situations we humans are in inherently stressful, or are our perceptions of them driving the stress? Have you ever been sitting at work and felt like you wanted to leap out your chair, announce to the world at large that you quit and go find some other task – even one with less compensation – if only to avoid the stress of YOUR job?
I polled many women to ask them if they experienced stress at their job. You might not be surprised that the CEO of a fortune 500 company is stressed, but did you ever imagine the woman handing you over your skinny vanilla latte was experiencing her own woes? If you think escaping your life into someone else’s Louboutins is the answer, think again. The real impact comes when we start digging around at how we personally perceive the situations that are causing us stress.
Is it hard? A little bit.
Is it possible? You bet.
Is it worth it? Oh yes. You have no idea.
Food for thought: Choose one situation in your life that is causing you stress and identify your predominant thoughts around it. Challenge yourself to come up with as many different interpretations of the situation as you can, other than the one you’ve been carrying. Go crazy. Make yourself laugh. When you run out of ideas, choose an interpretation that generates a feeling you’d prefer to have – contentment, competence, empathy, even humor. It may be a small step, but all it takes is making the first one. Let me know how it goes!
*Giving credit where credit is due! A great portion of the information about hormones and stress was based on the truly wonderful research of Dr. Elissa Epel, PhD. Dr. Epel is a health pscyhologist at UCSF.
Tags: emotional eating, emotions, stress eating, TFA, weight loss
