When we are stressed, it tends to show through in our diet. Stress leads to unwanted cravings, emotional eating, and decreased mental space for planning and making healthy meals. Stress also increases production of the hormone cortisol, which makes you crave energy-dense foods such as sugar, so it is helpful to do what you can to minimize stress in your life. In this day and age, it feels like everyone is stressed, but while it may seem common, this does not mean it’s normal. Stress negatively impacts both your overall health and wellness, but also it often causes us to not eat optimally for our health and metabolism. Read on to learn how to manage your stress, feel better, and consequently eat better.
Identifying Stress: Keep a Journal
It’s important to distinguish the reasoning for your sources of stress, whether it’s related to your emotions or your habits. You can reflect on your stressors by keeping a journal of your feelings on a daily or weekly basis. Writing about what was stressful to you repeatedly can help you to identify any patterns of stress, which will help you to create a plan to manage your stress and to know what you need to improve on. Track your emotions (happy, sad, angry, anxious, overwhelmed, etc.) and physical feelings (hungry, overly full, satisfied, nauseous, fatigued, groggy, mental fog, etc.)
Think about what’s causing any of the unwanted feelings and emotions. Here are some examples of how you can use journaling to reflect:
- If you wrote down several times in your journal that you consistently overate at night, that might warrant you to consider if you were eating enough during the day, or if you ate enough satiating components–protein, fiber, and healthy fats–throughout the day.
- If you found yourself feeling fatigued and having a mental fog, consider how much sleep you’ve been getting the last few nights.
- If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed most days, what specifically feels overwhelming to you? Is it overwhelming to prepare dinner every night? Are you often getting behind on work?
Using a journal, you can reflect on all of your feelings, both physical and emotional, where they are stemming from, and if you can make any changes to combat them.
Making Eating Less Stressful
Eat Throughout The Day
Consistently undereating or skipping meals causes your body to sense the deficiency in energy that is created. To compensate, you crave high-energy foods to fill the gap. These types of foods are typically high in refined carbohydrates that lack many nutrients. Eating regularly will reduce your cravings later in the day that stem from undereating. Even if skipping meals doesn’t lead you to increased cravings, it will still promote overeating later on when you do eat, so eating regular meals is of your best interest to sustain healthy eating habits.
Eat Enough Satiating Components
Make sure you are eating enough satiating components at every meal: protein, fiber, healthy fats. Having an adequate amount of these components in your meals aids in your overall feeling of satiety by slowing down how fast food leaves your stomach, so a lack of any of these can increase instances of cravings and poor eating choices due to low satiety. For effective snacks, never eat a “naked carb”, meaning always pair a carb-based food with a satiating component to follow the same principle.
Hunger-Fullness Scale
The hunger-fullness scale is a tool used to gauge your hunger and fullness cues. It runs from 1 to 10, with 1 being painfully starving, 10 being painfully full, and 5 being neither hungry nor full (neutral). It is ideal to keep yourself in the middle range of this scale, not getting outside 4 (hungry) or 7 (full). This tool can be used before, during, and after eating to help you learn how much you need to eat to feel good as well as when to eat. The hunger-fullness scale is also helpful for differentiating when you are thinking about food due to actual hunger versus emotional or stress-related factors.
Meal Prepping
Meal prepping involves intentionally setting aside one day of week–usually on the weekend–to prepare either whole meals or meal components to eat throughout the week. Preparing whole meals could involve putting together things such as salad bowls, grain bowls, soups, etc., whereas preparing meal components could for example look like preparing your favorite marinated chicken already cooked in bite sized pieces along with grilled veggies so that these can be tossed into meals you make throughout the week, greatly reducing the time it takes to prepare meals and the stress associated with it during busy workdays. Another helpful tactic to use to decrease stress and make healthy eating easier is to always keep 1 or 2 homemade meals in the freezer in which all you would have to do to prepare them would be to throw them in the oven. Having this as an option provides a backup plan for those days where you really feel you can’t handle thinking about doing any cooking.
Reduce Emotional Eating
Emotional eating often stems from stress or boredom, but addressing these triggers can help. Stress, especially when paired with poor sleep, can lead to unhealthy eating habits. Improving your nighttime routine and finding healthy outlets for stress instead of food such as exercise or meditation can make a big difference. Boredom can also drive emotional eating, so adding fulfilling activities like reading, yoga, or crafting to your routine can help. By tackling these underlying causes, you can reduce emotional eating and create a healthier balance.
Get Enough Sleep
Insufficient sleep can contribute to cravings for two primary reasons. One is that when you are sleep deprived, it’s more difficult to make good eating choices, and more often than not, you opt for the quick and easy boost of energy, such as a pastry. The second reason is that insufficient sleep increases ghrelin, the hunger hormone. You can decrease your body’s stress and have better control of what you eat by getting at least 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
Conclusion
Managing stress and cravings is essential for improving both your physical and mental well-being. By identifying stressors and adopting the healthy lifestyle habits discussed above, you can reduce your overall stress and make better food choices. Remember, small, consistent changes can have a big impact on your health over time. Stress less, eat better, and empower yourself to create a balanced, nourishing lifestyle.
In my 8+ years as a Registered Dietician Nutritionist & metabolism expert, I’ve helped 100s of women reach their nutrition goals through my signature 3M approach. By focusing on Mindset, Mindfulness, and Metabolism, you too can discover your most confident self and feel better than ever. This blog is a great place to start – whether you want to lose weight or learn to make meal planning for your busy life easier than ever!
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This article was written by Alyssa Coscino, nutrition intern. Fact checked by Allison Tallman RD.