10 Ways to Not Let Stress Affect Your Relationship With Food

“Give your stress wings and let it fly away.” ~ Terri Guillemets
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
“Stress is the trash of modern life – we all generate it but if you don’t dispose of it properly, it will pile up and overtake your life.” ~ Terri Guillemets
“Taking time out each day to relax and renew is essential to living well.” ~ Judith Hanson Lasater
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are”. ~ Chinese Proverb

How you handle stress can affect the relationship you have with food. One minute you are doing fine, but the next minute stress smacks you in the face.

This smack knocks you into lots of chocolate, a pack of cookies, a cake, a pie, a bag of potato chips, ice cream or several slices of pizza; you need comfort and these foods give you the comfort you need at that specific stressed time in your life.

You get the comfort you need from the food you devoured, but afterwards you feel bad for eating those foods. You ask yourself, “Why did I eat those foods? How did I eat so much?

Most of the time when you binge on foods that give you comfort, there is some level of stress occurring in your life.

No one can avoid dealing with stressful events in life, but we can choose how we deal with those stressors.

Today, you learn ways to deal with stress so you don’t find yourself on a food binge.

Stress and Your Body

Stress affects the body in many ways. Here some ways stress affects the body:

“it restricts blood flow
it causes healthy gut bacteria to die off
it causes the body to excrete nutrients
we have less thyroid and growth hormones
increases inflammation (break down of the body which causes disease)
produces more cortisol and insulin which signals the body to store weight and fat (the brain thinks the body needs a survival response)” – Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating

Ways to Deal with Stress in Your Life

1. Listen to your body. Tired? Get rest.
2. Take a deep breath and count to 10. This helps keep your calm.
3. Pay attention to how you respond to stress. If you know you will devour a pack of cookies, have healthier foods on hand.
4. Take Epsom Salt baths.
5. Keep a journal and write how you feel and what happens when you feel a certain kind of way (upset, angry, mad, etc.).
6. Pray and/or meditate. This helps you relax.
7. Slow down in life. Take your time with everything.
8. Know yourself. Oftentimes we walk around disconnected with ourselves and our bodies. Come home to yourself.
9. Don’t do anything that makes you unhappy or makes you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes you have no control over this. It is at those times when you need to know how you will respond (always have your game plan).
10. Always remember, things are never as bad as they seem. Keeping this in mind helps you stay calm and relaxed.

Stress can get the best of us, but when you know what triggers stress and how to handle stress, it makes your life better and you are better for it.

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anyone.” ~ Dr. Maya Angelou