Is Stress Causing Your Sugar Cravings and Weight Gain?
Stress is responsible for many health problems, including weight gain. Stress can cause you to put on weight, even if there is no significant change in your eating habits. However, it can also make you gain weight and experience food cravings, and cause you to eat more. This is usually also combined with less healthy food types that also contribute to weight gain.
And then, the extra weight – and the guilt over your eating habits – increases your stress level even more.
Here are factors that contribute to weight gain if you are experiencing chronic stress.
Stress Initiates Hormonal Changes That Can Result In Weight Gain
Stress is a chain reaction that affects multiple systems in our bodies. In response to a stressor, the nervous system sends the body into a fight-or-flight mode. This causes physical sensations such as increased heart rate, heightened senses, deep oxygen intake, and the release of adrenaline to initiate a quick and powerful response.
Finally, the stress hormone cortisol is released, which acts to restore the burned up fuel in the body during the stress response.
When the stressful moment passes, the body returns to stasis and stress hormones should calm down by normalizing to their pre-stress levels. However, chronic stress creates a perpetual cycle of heightened cortisol that can disrupt the body’s functions, resulting in weight gain, among other health problems.
Stress Causes a Change In Eating Habits
A big reason as to why stress causes people to gain weight is due to a change in their eating habits. Chronic stress elicits very noticeable changes in people’s behavior that directly causes weight gain. Some of these include emotional eating or binging, a preference for fast food, and a preference for unhealthy, sugary foods, salty or fatty foods, among others.
Notice how people get less inclined to eat healthy when they are stressed. They are far more likely to opt for fast food much of the time.
Stress Makes Metabolism Slow Down, Especially For Women
Stress can spell bad news for a person’s metabolism and this is especially true for women. In a study on women’s metabolism conducted at Ohio State University, women who reported stressors burned 104 lesser calories than women who were not stressed. In a year, that difference could lead up to a weight difference of roughly 11 pounds.
In addition, stressed-out women also reported higher insulin levels, which causes increased fat deposits. Stress-induced fats settle firstly in the abdominal area, which is very challenging to get rid of. Abdominal fat not only causes obesity and weight gain but is a health risk factor that can contribute to the development of cardiovascular health problems and diabetes.
Stress also causes less fat oxidation which is the process of converting large fat molecules into smaller molecules to be used as fuel by the body. Food that is not burned for energy gets stored as fat.
Stress Disrupts Sleep Habits
Even if people aren’t particularly eating more than usual, stress causes them to gain weight in other ways. Stress can lead to sleeping problems such as insomnia, and getting lesser sleep further causes the metabolism to slow down.
Lack of sleep initiates a set of reactions creating a loss of dedication to following through with healthy eating habits, as well as feeling too tired and unmotivated to exercise.
These may lead to other negative habits such as skipping proper meals, higher alcohol consumption, turning to fad diets, consumption of energy drinks and caffeine, forgetting to drink enough water, and eating more as a result. All these contribute to the likelihood of weight gain from stress.
Stress Also Makes You Crave Sugary Foods
Stress causes people to crave fatty, salty, processed, and especially sugary foods. Ever notice how you tend to crave more comfort food during a stressful period? These are likely cravings for sugary foods.
Eating sugar causes the brain to release feel-good chemicals, activating the reward system and mimicking the behavior of drugs like cocaine or amphetamine. Sugar seems to activate the biology of the reward system in the brain.
Research suggests that this brain-rewarding circuitry is a huge factor in why we get enhanced sugar cravings when we are stressed. Ultimately, this can lead to sugar addiction that can be equally harmful as smoking.
The Relationship Between Stress and Eating Habits
Let’s look a little more at the relationship between stress and eating habits. Most of our stress triggers are emotional rather than physical, but our body responds the same. However, there is rarely an associated physical response sufficient to diminish the stress hormone cocktail, so they remain in the system.
When stress piles up and is a regular occurrence, then the body’s homeostatic state is damaged. Acute stress instances turn into a chronic type of stress, which causes damaging changes to physiological and psychological wellbeing. One of its effects is manifested directly through a person’s eating habits.
Research shows that there is a direct correlation between stress and a person’s relationship with food. In the face of stress, people often react in two ways – either they forget and ignore their hunger, or they turn to food as a way of coping with the stressful situation at hand, causing them unhealthy eating habits like binge eating or emotional eating.
Why People Overeat During Highly Stressful Periods
A majority of people turn to food during tense or highly stressful moments. As a natural reaction of the body to stress, persistent cortisol levels increase, which in turn helps levels of insulin to increase, causing the person to crave instant, tasty, high-energy foods.
The brain ensures there is enough fuel to fight the perceived threat that is underway or whatever is causing stressful feelings. The high-energy, high-calorie foods would help in responding to physical danger, but that is rarely the case.
People who turn to food as a way to cope with periodic bouts of stress point out a variety of reasons for their behavior.
- Food distracts them from stressful feelings
- Food helps them to manage and handle stress
- Their behavior has already developed into a habit that they can’t easily break away from.
Eating can indeed be a great source of temporary comfort, as eating this type of food triggers the release of a different set of hormones that dull the feelings associated with the stress temporarily. However they do not diminish the stress hormones, so ultimately the problem remains, and is now compounded by ingestion of unneeded and usually unhealthy foo
Why Some People Ignore their Hunger When Stressed
On the other end of the spectrum are those who can ignore or forget their feelings of hunger when they’re facing a stressful situation. These type of people respond to stress with heightened feelings of anxiety. When a person is feeling anxious, stress can cause them to lose appetite.
Think of highly tense moments like hours before a big exam, moments before delivering a presentation, an upcoming job interview, or possibly even during difficult moments like a relationship breakup.
Some people dramatically lose their appetite as a result of these events. They can end up so consumed by the stressful circumstances that they lose sight of completing other important and basic things – like eating.
When the body is in an anxious state, it tends to focus all of its resources on either directly facing the threat head-on (fight response) or avoiding further danger and damage (flight response).
Additionally, feeling stressed can cause the hypothalamus to produce corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) – a peptide hormone involved in the stress response. CRH can temporarily suppress appetite, increase feelings of anxiety, and boost focus and attention to help you zero in on the stressful moment.
Which one are you – do you tend to overeat, or forget to eat in the height of stress? Understanding your own response can help you to more appropriately respond to stressful events in the future.
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