How Stress Can Affect Your Diet

Stress. We all experience it one time or another. If you are like many of us on a path of eating right and healthy living, you have realized that stress can affect your weight loss. Stress can have many effects on our physiology. Many common stresses from our daily lives, such as from work, family, or our environment, can trigger and release the stress hormone cortisol.

A great way to deal with one's stress is to engage in some sort of exercise. In fact, combining a bit of regular exercise with a proper diet makes for a great defense against the onset of chronic stress.

Stress can have a powerful effect on your appetite and food cravings. Stress affects the way your body chooses healthy foods, how you digest those foods and how you absorb nutrients. Poor diet contributes to stress, which, in turn, contributes to a poor diet. For a number of people, food becomes a mechanism for coping with stress.

Continued stress can also increase your cortisol level, stimulating feelings of hunger. Cortisol is responsible for cravings for sugar and high fat foods. It also contributes to the formation of fat in your midsection, putting you at greater risk for cardiovascular disease, increased blood pressure and Type II diabetes

If your eating habits leave your diet short short of essential nutrients, even supplements appear to be a helpful resource in mitigating stress.

For some, stress and diet can come together and form a vicious circle. For example, some people when feeling stressed have a tendency to not only eat, but eat foods that are high in fat. This is not a good habit to get into, not only from a diet perspective but stress as well. Some studies indicate that higher fat foods are actually counter productive to the production of serotonin and thus only add to the duration of the stress itself.

As with anything moderation is the key; but for other reasons too. Excessive calories are difficult to burn off and as the person becomes increasingly overweight, their body and their self image can begin to spiral downward. As a result this can begin to effect one's self image which ultimately opens the door for stressful thinking. If this trend isn't reversed the individual runs the risk of entering a state of depression

There are two kinds of stress eaters:

1. The emotional eater. Emotional eaters turn to food when feeling anxious and have a tendency to overeat at every meal. Or they may put off eating until dinner, and then they overindulge. This type of eater also turns to food when feeling sad, after a bad day at work, when frustrated or when a relationship turns sour.
2. The restrictive eater. This type of eater restricts their food intake, which increases their stress because they forbid themselves from eating specific foods. These eaters diet frequently, often cutting out entire food groups and depriving themselves of vital nutrients. Restrictive eaters set themselves up for binging, stress-related eating and life-long weight fluctuations.

Although breaking this cycle can be a difficult task it is more than worth the effort. Becoming more fit helps reduce the effects of the stress induced chemicals in your body. Also, as you improve your fitness and your eating habits you'll be developing a body that you are proud of and thus elevating your overall mood.

One of the tools available to help break a cycle of poor nutrition is to get into the habit of eating at as regular times as you possibly can. Many times when people are stressed they will skip meals or toss back some unhealthy food at a rapid pace.

Today work schedules can be counter productive to proper nutrition as well only adding to the natural stress of the workplace itself. A busy schedule, timelines and expectations to meet, meetings over the lunch hour all have a cumulative effect on our level of stress and make it difficult to break the stress cycle. You need to make a commitment to engaging in a healthy nutritious lifestyle.

Take the time to enjoy your meal. Focus positive aspects of your life and your environment. Make sure you take time for yourself to spend time away from the external stress agents in your life that are the contributors.

Take the time to do some additional research on the relationship between the stress you feel and the diet you're engaged in. Taking control over daily stresses can help in achieving weight loss goals. It is not enough to exercise and watch what we eat - relieving stress is also essential.