How Stress Causes Overeating and How to Manage It

Weight Loss for Foodies podcast | Ditch the Diet and Lose Weight with Shari Broder

You’re not imagining it. Stress makes people want to eat.

If you’re an emotional eater, when you’re stressed out, you’re more likely to feel the urge to eat. That’s because when your body feels stress, it produces certain stress hormones which cause you to crave comfort foods.

Sometimes, stress might kill your appetite because the stress hormone adrenaline puts you in a state of fight or flight.

When stress is chronic, however, the opposite happens.

Too much stress upsets your hormonal balance, making it harder to lose weight and easier to gain it.

This is made even worse by the overconsumption of simple carbohydrates, which are sugary snacks like candy bars and soda. They also can cause a hormone imbalance.

Basically, being consistently stressed out for a long period of time causes your body to produce an assortment of hormones that make it more likely that your body will store fat instead of using it for energy, and cause you to want to eat more.

Stress also seems to affect your food preferences, making you more likely to consume foods high in fat, sugar, or both. These foods reduce the stress response and can calm your emotions temporarily. That’s why many people associate stress eating with feeling better. And guess what? That causes you to want to keep doing it.

The problem is that it doesn’t solve what’s causing your stress in the first place. And by consistently eating in response to stress when you aren’t hungry, you’ll gain weight.

So what can you do to prevent stress from undermining your weight loss goals?

Listen to learn more about how stress makes weight loss harder and how you can manage stress and, feel better.