7 Ways To Curb Stress Eating During A Crisis - COVID-19 Pandemic
#SugarBalancedLiving
Eating out of stress… otherwise known as: stress eating, or emotional eating. Its our default setting, where we find ourselves reaching for sugary treats and junk foods every time we feel overwhelmed, stressed, or tired out in our day to day life. Of course, no matter how hard you work to create a positive, stress and toxic-free everyday environment, and take every effort to avoid negative stressful situations, they will always manage to pop up in our daily lives-- I mean heck, did anyone ever think we’d be facing a pandemic right now?
SO… let me show you some great steps to STOP stress eating aka emotional eating during this COVID-19 pandemic, during other crises or simply during a stressful situation!
Emotional eating… we’ve all experienced it. You know that deep down feeling - that yearning, that need, NO actually - the sheer necessity-- for a large bowl of gooey, yummy, filling macaroni and cheese, followed by a huge bowl of comforting ice cream, to heal the wounds of a long, hard, stressful day. Literally nothing else will do. Period.
That my friend is eating out of stress… otherwise known as: stress eating, or emotional eating.
For some of us this is just an occasional occurrence, but, sadly, for many of us it’s an affliction. It’s our default setting, where we find ourselves reaching for the sugary treats and junk foods every time we feel overwhelmed, stressed, or tired out in our day to day life.
But why exactly does emotional eating happen?
Emotional eating occurs when you use food to address, or hide, intense emotions. Usually these intense emotions are negative ones: like sadness, stress, grief, a lack of a feeling of control, and loneliness-- but interestingly, it can also be triggered out of happiness or comfort, it’s just easier to control.
It’s actually a very normal reflexive action derived from our collective human experience. Think about it. From the moment we’re born, the natural cycle is for us to cry and in return be offered breast milk, a substitute, or another type of food.
It’s in our very psyche to associate food with an emotion. That’s why when we feel in a strong emotional state, we tend to crave high-calorie, processed and high-sugar foods, some people may turn to binge eating, others may start grazing behavior-- where you constantly eat throughout the day or night — or other emotional eating may manifest in restricting what you eat, in an attempt to feel control over something during uncertainty.
An intense emotion feeling also causes a drop is some of our body’s chemical neurotransmitters and hormones, which then activates our brain to send messages to our nervous system to make us feel better.
We lean on food then as a coping mechanism during experiencing a life event, using it to both soothe and distracts from the emotions, providing a temporary or short-term feeling of satisfaction.
This in turn can just lead to that negative emotion being enhanced because the craving to eat was never about hunger because it's a different kind of fullness we are trying to achieve.
That feeling of emotional eating also creates a habit and vicious constant cycle of negative eating patterns-- food crazies of overeating, binge eating, comfort eating, cheat eating and negative food obsessions, which in turn can prevent you from utilizing healthy coping mechanisms and healing methods to approach these emotions.
The plain truth is that unless you honestly address the actual emotions driving the eating, your desire to eat will remain when stressed, often leading to longer-term harm.
And… sadly, a STRESSFUL CRISIS spawns unintended stress eating like no-other… roll out the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s an emotional eating disaster on steroids waiting to happen.
Fears about COVID-19 can take a serious emotional toll: feelings of powerlessness, profound gut-wrenching anxiousness, which in turn play havoc on our normal daily habits and behavior, especially those that are good for us.
Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, stress eating is now on the rise all around the globe as we all have to face the COVID-19 pandemic crisis together. As we attempt to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us are feeling increasingly stressed.
Fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, while co-occurring with requirements for social distancing and an increasing difficult economic reality for many, is leading many to turn to junky food eating coping strategies especially while we’re cooped up inside.
A lot of people are struggling with their eating right now – this proves that we need to tackle emotional eating now more than ever, and that’s why today I’m going to walk you through 7 powerful and doable actions that you can start now to crush your stress and emotional eating habit for good.
Not only does emotional eating not fix the problem, lead to regret, physical discomfort, skin break-outs, insomnia, and weight gain, but is both physically and psychologically harmful, and when your stressed protecting your immune system is more important than ever and chugging junky or sugary foods down will only crash your immune system when you need it most.
So Why Is Emotional Eating So Dangerous For COVID-19?
In fact, poor eating habits and choices lead to horrible conditions like pre-diabetes (metabolic syndrome) type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, gout, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, hypertension, obesity, kidney disease, and cancer, which in turn are the very fuel for extreme COVID-19 symptoms.
Meaning those who have ‘compromised’ (think: conditions like diabetes, cancer, HIV/AIDS, have a pacemaker) or ‘weakened’ (think: smokers, are overweight, high-blood pressure, work with harmful substances like dust and chemicals, eat a high processed, sugar, and junk food diet) immune systems are more at risk and vulnerable to the virus, so if exposed to COVID-19 are simply statistically more likely to get extreme symptoms and even pass away from them.
So even those of you who don’t as far as you know have an underlying immune system issue (diabetic, heart disease, cancer etc. and remember they make up 6 in 10 Americans) but know that you are in some way weakening it through your poor choice of diet, smoking, and so on, you are still seriously putting yourself at risk.
Here’s some context. The current data shows that:
Obesity increases the risk of death almost 3 fold.
Up to 40% of the hospitalizations in 20 to 54-year olds, and most of those are obese and overweight.
Scary right?
Taking the time now then, to not only protect yourself during this crisis, but to protect yourself, during future, problems, stressors, issues and crises is critical to empower yourself, and your health.
I’m here to help… and I'm a serious expert when it comes to emotional eating and I'm going to go through steps and tricks to help you curb your stress eating, and how you can learn to actually deal with the stress in a healthy way!
Why We Emotionally Eat During Stressful Times?!
In order to curb emotional eating while in the face of a crisis or stress, we’ll need to reflect on why our bodies and mind are causing us to crave high-calorie, processed and high-sugar foods during stressful times.
There are physiological reasons for turning to food during crisis, which usually always leads us back to STRESS!
Stress is something we all become a little bit too acquainted with from our teenage years onward. It also happens to be one of the most common reason for junky food cravings.
Stress itself, is actually anatomically speaking, a mixture of chemical hormones produced in the body when the brain perceives a physical or psychological threat, it starts pumping the chemicals cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine throughout the body.
Instantly, the heart beats faster, blood pressure increases, senses sharpen, a rise in blood glucose invigorates us and we're ready for action. Essentially then, stress is a burst of energy to help you survive.
So in other words, it doesn’t mean that all stress is bad for you, in fact in can save your life like jumping out of the way of a speeding car, but, it’s the negative, constant stress and anxiety which is linked to a whole host of health problems; poor digestion, infertility, diabetes, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, and other mental health issues.
In fact, this type of chronic stress is also potentially fatal, so it needs to be constantly watched. So let’s recap.
Good stress is acute. Examples of acute stress are a run-in with a colleague, a disaster in the kitchen, but also exercise, which is actually a really beneficial positive stress.
Bad stress is chronic. Examples of bad-for-you stress include being in an unhappy relationship, a job you dread turning up for each day, or regular bills you struggle to pay, loneliness, over scheduling and serious life events like the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, or of course the COVID-19 pandemic.
What exactly is this bad stress (chronic stress) doing to our brains?
Well, stress can cause certain parts of your brain to release particular chemicals (opiates and neuropeptide Y). These opiates and neuropeptide Y cause mechanisms that are quite similar to cravings from fat and sugar.
Going back in time to our evolution, running the risk of a bad food harvest which could result in a food shortage would trigger a stress reaction, and a physiological response from our brains and bodies that would highly motivate us into survival mode and prioritize stocking up on hearty foods.
This didn’t just mean stock piling it, but the actual binge eating of foods, in particular sweet fruits.
This response hasn’t left us, because think about it, nutrition is a foundation of life essential for both a healthy stress response and longevity.
Of course most of us obviously don’t need this response anymore, but unfortunately your brain still feels an addictive call for fatty and sugary foods.
This is coupled with the fact that stress leads to elevated cortisol levels, which prompts an increased appetite, as your body instinctively goes in search of energy. Its searching out the high sugar and calorie foods to provide it with the short bust of energy that it is automated to do when put in a stressed state. It’s not aware of all the fast food, sugar and junk alternatives now available!
Those very same sugary and high blood sugar level spiking non-whole form foods like processed carbs generate dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation and reward. Meaning it activates the pleasure center of your brain.
You can see how easy it is to get caught in a loop.
On top of the increased food cravings, prolonged chronic mental stress can also lead to some serious health conditions and symptoms including:
Risk of high blood pressure, making it more likely that a stroke will follow.
Chronic inflammation.
Comprised and weakened immune system.
Sleep problems and insomnia.
Weight gain.
Increased risk of diabetes.
Increased risk of a heart attack.
Unstable and imbalanced hormones.
Chronic digestive issues.
Intense and overwhelming sugar cravings.
General unhappiness, or depression.
Anxiety, agitation, moodiness, irritability, or anger.
Feeling overwhelmed.
Loneliness and isolation.
Furthermore, when you give into emotional eating the brain gets conditioned to believe that sugar and junk food is what we need to feel better during stressful situations, causing it to seeks out unhealthy foods again and again.
And here’s the kicker.
Eating sugar or processed foods will do no favors to your already compromised stressed immune system.
After you consume processed sugars and refined carbs like nibbling on a cookie or drinking soda, the sugar will instantly curb the effectiveness of your immune system cells that would normally attack bacteria-- leaving you vulnerable to chronic and acute seasonal allergies, fatigue, tiredness, and lethargy, and most important to you right now extreme COVID-19 symptoms.
These processed foods and sugars also bring on systemic inflammation (inflammation is part of our body’s immune system response, and is a reaction to protect the body from injury or intruders), which can manifest in the body as joint pain, headaches, illness, tiredness, and over time even organ distress and diabetes.
What Should You Do To Stop Stress + Emotional Eating?!
Of course, no matter how hard you work to create a positive, stress and toxic-free everyday environment, and take every effort to avoid negative stressful situations, they will always manage to pop up in our daily lives-- I mean heck, did anyone ever think we’d be facing a pandemic right now?
However, what we can do is learn how to deal with situations that trigger anxiety and stress in a different and positive way, so we can reprogram our automatic response and break the emotional and stress eating patterns, as well as the corresponding desire for junk and sugar that goes with them.
This can help you overcome the addictive pull of junk food and break the cycle.
What I’ve learned is that the food crazies, emotional eating and the cravings for junk and sugar can feel so insurmountable that we can just want to throw our hands up and give in, especially if we’re relying on willpower. #DitchTheWillPower
That’s why getting a grip on your cravings is not about willpower, but it’s rather about integrating the appropriate habits into your daily life, and looking at the intention behind the action and how it ultimately makes you feel.
It’s not about the willpower to give up certain foods, but developing the taste for good ones. Just as with exercise, it’s not about forcing yourself to the gym every week as much as finding a way to actually look forward to it and enjoy it.
Let me show you some great steps to STOP stress eating aka emotional eating during this COVID-19 pandemic, during other crises or simply during a stressful situation!
ACTION STEP ONE| What’s The Intention Behind The Action?
When you get that desire to eat, stop, pause, take a moment, and ask yourself the following:
Am I eating this to numb how I’m feeling?
If I eat this will I truly enjoy it, or will I feel hollow?
Will I feel better after eating this?
Is this what my body needs?
Do I want or need this?
Will I feel shame or guilt after eating this?
Will I hurt my immunity by eating this?
If you believe that you will feel deep-down nourished, satisfied and grateful then you’re good to go.
However, you’re in the early stages of tackling your emotional eating so you may not quite authentically understand yourself yet, so the second part to this is to begin journaling and keep a food diary for at least 7 days writing down what you eat and how you felt at the time. Keeping a journal allows you to see your patterns. As you go back through what you’ve written, you’ll notice certain things keep coming up.
Identify those behaviors, and what is triggering you to reach into the refrigerator or the pantry and to start mindlessly eating, and you can then start the work of healing those emotions.
If you uncover stress, anxiety, and burnout causing your stress and emotional eating tendencies that goes beyond the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps coming from your relationships, work, money, health, or from events or traumas from your past that have you caught in a stress loop, zapping your energy and keeping you stuck, then it’s time for you to take action to resolve them.
This is why identifying all your stressors in your life, particularly unhealthy lifestyle patterns and behaviors, and then focusing on shedding your mind of conscious and sub-conscious negative habits, attitudes and patterns triggering it, is such a huge part of The Stress Reset Course© because it’s SO IMPORTANT for clearing them for good.
To help you in the short term you can nab my free 21 day stress cleanse calendar to get you started (plus give you something to focus and do through this self-isolation/quarantine phase and COVID-19 😊).
CLICK HERE TO GET THE CALENDAR
ACTION STEP TWO| Deal With Triggers
Moving on from action one, work towards learning to recognize your triggers for emotionally-based eating. Become clear about when you will be most likely to want to eat more or less.
Triggers can be external or internal, ask yourself questions:
When are you likely to stress eat?
What types of food do you crave and when?
What situation make it hard for you to stay balanced and control your cravings and eating behaviors?
In order to start taking action on curbing those cravings, add to your journaling notes reflections you have on your emotional triggers. Write down how you feel when a craving hits and what situation causes you to want to eat. Then record what you experience when you eat your favorite junk food (pleasure, comfort, shame, etc.), and how you feel afterwards.
From there you can prepare ahead of time for that emotional eating trigger by finding an action to take the moment that intense craving hits you, and replace it with a healthy comfort like calling a friend, or talking a walk, or even a positive food action like whipping on your apron, putting some music on, and making something healthier to eat that you can feel proud of and positive about. Check out my Recipes Section for some yummy inspiration.
When it comes down to stress triggered my COVID-19 pandemic, you may find it insensitive to be worrying about stress eating now, with so many people worrying about food and money in the midst of massive economic disruption.
But, worrying about food can itself form into emotional eating. Restriction, and worry of not physically being able to have enough food, can backlash into stress eating, with a belief that you should eat while you still can.
Remember self-care it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity. Take care of yourself.
ACTION STEP THREE| Mindful Activities
Using meditations and breathing exercises, both, as a consistent weekly practice to reprogram those negative stress and emotional eating episodes and urges in general, plus, doing them specifically when you have an intense compulsion come over you in order to curb and inhibit them are two incredibly effective techniques.
When an impulse is triggered, carrying out a meditation, and (or), some simple breathing techniques is the quickest way to send the firm command to your body’s stress signals: ‘NO.’
This simple, and easy, method, essentially works by outsmarting your reptilian brain-- which is urging us to eat out of emotion.
When facing a scary, worrisome, stressful problem, you’re interrupting the thought and desire by being mindful, getting you to slow down, and take several good, deep breaths.
This will reset your sympathetic nervous systems and allow you to make smarter, more balanced decisions, that’ll serve you in the long run and deal with problem at hand.
I have a FREE Guided “Let Go Of The ‘What Ifs’ + Stress Relief Meditation” you can download and listen to right now to feel the calm and get you started.
Again, tie this in with the first two actions and instead of judging your emotions or running on autopilot, observe what you’re feeling and acknowledge them. You can write it down in your private journal to relieve stress. Speaking (or calling) with close friends also helps.
You could also try something more physical like exercise, yoga, tai chi, or for after this virus pandemic is over acupuncture or getting a massage is a great activity for stress relief.
I personally having been hitting HASfit Youtube channel because they have such a huge selection of different types of exercise and different lengths, and come across and down to earth, nice people. I also do Bikram in front of the TV without the heat. My two favorites are Dr Espen Hjalmby 60 min Hot Yoga Class + Guided Meditation, and then 30 Minute Hot 26 Yoga Class - Hot Yoga Asheville for a great overall stretch, and the feeling of stillness and calm in mind.
I can’t over emphasize to you the power of learning, and exercising mindfulness-- it literally was a key pillar in me addressing chronic stress and anxiety brought on when we experienced the global economic crash of 2008 where the struggle of simply making sure we got food regularly was our daily reality.
If you’re not already familiar with it, mindfulness is a practice that involves being fully focused on the present moment and bringing awareness to your thoughts and feelings. If you want to read more into how mindfulness works, check out this blog post.
My journey has led me to believe that your mind is your most powerful asset. That your mind has the ability to hold you back or let you achieve success. It’s your mind that controls your body and environment, and that’s why it’s such an important aspect of your life.
Mindfulness has even been shown to enhance weight loss, promote healthy eating habits, help break food addictions, and even produce better examination performance. It’s why I created an entire Mindfulness Library within my Sugar Balance + Wellness Circle membership community of ‘how-tos’, tools, exercises and challenges, not only to teach it, but to keep it up as a super effective method to build and maintain mental resilience and calm no matter what life throws at you.
ACTION STEP FOUR| Get Enough Sleep
Sleep is vital to helping you quash those stress and emotional eating urges. Even a single night of sleeping only four to six hours can impact your ability to think clearly the next day, making you more susceptible to making decisions that aren’t in your best interests.
There are literally so many terrible consequences of getting insufficient sleep which you can read about in my post here, but, the point is that you’re going to make your task of combating your stress and emotional eating problems triple fold without taking your sleep seriously.
You should be looking to get between 7-9 hours as an adult between the ages of 18 to 64. If you’re suffering from poor sleep or insomnia then please, please, please, make the time to improve it now.
ACTION STEP FIVE| Reflect
So by now you’ll be noticing that there is a reoccurring theme: stress and emotional eating is really about mastering control over your mind.
Your goal is to become acutely aware of your appetite and its various types of hunger levels and cravings, linked and based around your emotions, so you can tune in to your body’s real needs.
When you become more aware of your feelings, and you can work them through, you’ll no longer bury those emotions in a burger and fries. It’s an important action then to make daily self-reflection a consistent habit, so that you learn to respond to your feelings of stress instead of just reacting to them.
Take short moment throughout each day to reflect on how you feel. Question yourself:
How are you doing?
When have I been feeling most stressed?
How have my feelings been affecting my experience of life today?
If you fall into trouble, hit a rough moment or day reflect, and start again. Start again by encouraging yourself to start fresh right now. Remind yourself it’s a process, and it’s okay to fall down, as long as you get up again.
Remember, you can decide how you want to react and how you want to feel, work it through and start fresh. Be kind, be patient, and be compassionate to yourself to yourself (sadly too often we can practice compassion to others but not ourselves), and ditch the judgments and negative self-talk.
Focus on progress, NOT perfection.
Don’t look to food, look to happiness and something positive in your life, in fact, look for something positive outside your own terms of reference. For example, in all this madness of this pandemic, there’s 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore, World War Two veteran, raising over $15 million for the British National Health Service as he completes garden challenge- he was initially hoping to raise just £1,000!
Take every day to reflect on the good in life, and make this a core habit and you will prosper. As Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found:
“As we make a habit of seeking out pleasing states, we change and grow, becoming better versions of ourselves, developing the tools we need to make the most out of lives … The benefits of positive emotions obey a tipping point: When positive emotions outnumber negative emotions by at least 3 to 1, the benefits accrue.”
ACTION STEP SIX| Connect with Family and Friends
Get social with friends and family…
People who spend time with family and friends find healthier ways to cope with stress. People use family and friends as a stress buffer, talking about their problems instead of seeking negative coping mechanisms like food.
Now, of course if you’re reading this during the coronavirus crisis, you maybe wondering how you can ‘get social’ while social distancing?
Well, while you’re hunkered down at home, don’t cut yourself off from the world, it’s still important to stay connected as best we can and reach out for support when we need it, even as we cut back on in-person socializing, you can still distantly socialize, by taking advantage of the tech we have access today, like video chat, text, phone class and emails.
Social media can also be a powerful tool in not only connecting with friends, and family but for feeling a connection with the world, in remembering you’re all in this together.
Just be careful to stay mindful of how social media is making you feel and muting keywords or even people who are causing you stress and anxiety.
If you’re sheltering with family right now take this time as an opportunity to have quality time with each other, or commit to re-connect and rekindle relationships. Sadly, a new survey calculated that Americans prior to the pandemic are ‘enjoying’ just 37 minutes of ‘quality time’ as a family on weekdays.
Dust of your board games, press play on the music and dance, play with your family, flat mates, or your pet. Cook with your friends or family via Zoom, or pick a Netflix show that you can binge with chosen peeps via an app like Houseparty.
This is the time for you to really bond and unshackle yourself from judgments (like: I feel childish!) and find joy and appreciation in the simplest but deepest of moments that have always been there for you.
And if you need a friend and extra virtual hug and high-five, reach out to me, I'm always going live on Instagram, Facebook , so feel free to come and hang with me over at @itsisabellem or facebook.com/IsabelleMcKenzieOfficial
Even with all the craziness going on right now, taking the time now to address and take the steps to resolve and remove your emotional and stress eating behaviors to protect yourself not only during this crisis, but for any possible future crisis, problems, and stressors is time well spent and you won’t regret a thing.
Getting a healthy grip on your stress and getting it to work for you instead of against you will literally change your life in every positive way.
Emotional eating is a way to suppress negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness, and, again, not only does emotional eating not help with stress, lead to regret, physical discomfort, and weight gain, but is both physically and psychologically harmful, and when your stressed protecting your immune system is more important than ever and chugging junky or sugary foods down will only crash your immune system when you need it most.
Remember, COVID-19 thrives on a compromised immune system, which is one of the triggers of eating processed sugar and junk foods and beverages.
In this pandemic, you need your immunity strong right now.
Following through the steps and tricks in this article will finally send you on your way to curbing your emotional eating and teach you to deal with unwanted negative emotions, triggers, and make conscious choices that will actually help you comfort yourself in a ‘healthy’ way, that focuses on mental wellness and stress relief.
Correctly tackling and resolving your daily and long-term stress will completely, powerfully, and wholeheartedly transform the quality of your life.
I feel so passionately about this that to help serve you in this unchartered times, my team and I are opening up my private wellness community for new members, Sugar Balance + Wellness Circle. It’s our very best resource to help you take care of yourself from home in these tough times.
If you feel alone let me assure you aren’t. Fear is simply doing its best to derail us-- to make us forget how connected and resilient we truly are.
Get and give as much social support as you can from loved ones, and other open-hearted folks: whether it’s today during this stressful phase of life for millions of people in the world, or after this finally ends – support is always a key in life.
If you need the most up-to-date info on coronavirus/COVID-19 hop over to my 10,000-word blog post containing the most up-to-date info on coronavirus –including a LIFE-SAVING Sepsis Protocol YOU MUST KNOW…
… as well as self-care strategies from dietary and lifestyle ways to support your immune system health and overall wellness right now from the doctors on the front line, through to stress management techniques, to help you get through. CLICK HERE.
Take those active steps right now to tackle emotional eating and work to find new healthy habits and steps to manage stress, and don't give up if you slip or trip. It's hard to stop emotional eating, so when you trip up, forgive yourself and start over again.
Here’s the thing, we as humans love routines, rituals and habits, in fact, it’s often said that success is a habit, and our routines are the small-but-mighty steps that have the power to shape our lives and futures.
As John Irving stated: “Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”
Let’s get yours started today, I’m right there with you.
You’re not alone on this journey to stress-free health and feeling good.
Get the coaching and support you need to care of yourself— mind, body, health, stress care and wellness focused uniquely on your needs. And if you’re looking for connection, our Sugar Balance + Wellness Inner Circle community will quickly become your family of people who care about your success and understand what you’re going through- because they’re going through it too. It’s a space where you can make friends, share ideas and receive encouragement anytime you need it.