How To Avoid Stress Eating
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With finals season quickly approaching, students’ healthy eating habits are often put on hold for the sake of good grades.
“When I get anxiety I always snack too much,” said junior English major Grace Hattery. “Recently I had a big paper due and I bought a whole bag of dum-dums and ate half of it in like a day.”
Image courtesy of Grace Hattery
Stress eating is a common response to academic pressure, and it takes a toll on physical and mental health. Here is how stress eating affects us and what we can do to prevent it.
What is Stress Eating?
Stress eating is using eating as a coping mechanism when feeling overwhelmed. This is especially relevant for college students during midterms and finals, when long days in the library interrupt regularly scheduled meals.
“Stress, the hormones it unleashes and the effects of high-fat, sugary ‘comfort foods’ push people toward overeating,” according to Harvard Health Publishing.
Why Do We Stress Eat?
“Food is a very easily accessible and cheap way of comforting ourselves,” said University of Maryland’s campus dietitian Jane Jakubczak.
People with high stress are most often drawn to sugary foods to cope.
“Sugar can give us a kind of sedative effect because it actually raises some brain chemistry that will give us a calm feeling,” Jakubczak explained.
The issue with stress eating is that, when it becomes a habit, it can lead to weight gain and subpar nutrition. When we replace meals with instantly gratifying sugary snacks, our appetites for healthy and filling meals decreases.
How Can I Prevent Stress Eating?
The best way to avoid stress eating is to find other methods of coping with stress.
The most effective ways to calm down include practicing deep breathing, fitting in a quick workout between study sessions or even replacing a bag of chips with a phone call to a friend.
It’s also important to give yourself time for three substantial meals during the day, regardless of how much studying you have to get done. When our regular eating patterns are interrupted, it can make us more susceptible to stress eating. Since stress eating does not give us the necessary fuel to be productive, it can actually make studying more difficult and less effective.
However, don’t worry – stress eating every once in a while is nothing to worry about.
“It is very normal to stress eat sometimes,” said Jakubczak. “It’s not a problem if it’s on occasion.”
But, if you feel like food is what you turn to when feeling overwhelmed, opt for a new stress-reduction mechanism to create a healthier habit.
