How Stress Affects Stress Essay

Top 9 reasons on how stress affects eating.

We are all if not all the time, under some level of stress in dealing with our daily routines. Be it stress at the work place, college, school or even at home, it still pervades us. We will discuss the top ten reasons on how stress affects our eating over the next few days.

Reason #1: The relation between food cravings and stress. - Stress can have a powerful effect on your appetite and food cravings. Stress affects how you absorb nutrients, the way your body chooses healthy foods and how you digest those foods. For a number of people, food becomes a mechanism for coping with stress.

Reason #2: One can eat food at random hours due to stress. - The emotional eater: Emotional eaters choose food when they are feeling anxious due to which they have a tendency to overeat at every meal.

- The restrictive eater. These kind of eaters restrict their food intake, which in turn increases their stress because they stop themselves from eating certain kinds of foods. These eaters diet frequently, many a times by ignoring entire food groups and depriving their body of vital nutrients. Restrictive eaters keep binging, putting themselves in a stress-related eating situation, leading to life-long weight fluctuations.

Reason #4: Stress eaters take eating as a coping mechanism. - In a perfect world, your body would experience stress, handle your response to it and your body’s systems would return to normal. Unfortunately, this does not always happen. When a threat is perceived, whether real or not, you keep thinking about it. The power of your imagination causes your body to respond as though a threat is real, even if it is not. This is the root of what is called the ‘stress response.’

The longer an acute stress phase lasts, the more difficult time you have getting out of it. If you handle stress with food, entering the stress cycle causes you to turn to food as a coping