Food was always on Nancy Bryan’s mind. Up until her early 20s, she continuously plotted out what, how much and when she could eat in order to manage, work on and fight for the elusive lighter body she hoped was somewhere inside. “That’s how I thought you dealt with weight — you battled it,” says Bryan, a writer living in Los Angeles.
But then, during her senior year of college, she fell in love. She fell so hard that she couldn’t think about anything else — even food. When she stepped on the scale out of curiosity a few weeks later, she’d lost 20 pounds. “I’m standing there thinking, ‘How in the world did this happen?'” Bryan recalls. “That could not have happened in my perceptual universe.”
Now Bryan, author of “Thin is a State of Mind,” which was first published in 1980 but has recently been updated, understands what happened. She hadn’t changed her eating or exercise habits, just what occupied her mind. Rather than feeling perpetually stressed about food, she was on cloud nine. “Being interested in eating vanished from my universe because I was thinking only about this wonderful man,” she says.
[See: 10 Unusual Weight-Loss Tips That Actually Work.]
What Bryan experienced seems ironic but it’s often true: The more you worry about what you eat, the more weight you may gain (or the less weight you lose). Studies show, for example, that women who report preoccupation with weight and dietary restraint — i.e. trying to limit how much they eat in order to lose or maintain weight — are more likely to gain weight than lose it.
This doesn’t just seem to be because yo-yo dieting may alter your metabolism and lead to weight gain over time, or because depriving yourself of foods you believe are unhealthy can set some people up to fixate — and eventually binge — on them.
It also has to do with how your mind influences your body. One study, for example, found that women with more negative eating attitudes had higher blood pressures than those who didn’t stress about food — regardless of their weight, actual eating patterns or physical activity level. Consistently worrying about food, the researchers suggest, may set off your body’s stress response. And stress is a well-known contributor to weight gain.
“Thoughts generate emotions, and all emotions are are physiologic responses to an interpretation,” says Julie L. Pike, a psychologist in Durham, North Carolina, who specializes in treating anxiety.
The Stress Connection
To be sure, wanting to be aware of what foods are healthiest and make you feel your best can be a good thing. Some people need to follow certain diets to manage conditions like diabetes or celiac disease, and others are happiest when they can eat in accordance with their values, say, by following a vegan diet, Pike says. But these days, it’s easy to take health-consciousness too far, experts say. “I’ve seen people take nine to 10 hours a day to plan food or research food, and it’s not about being passionate, it’s about being obsessed to the exclusion of other daily activities that we might value,” Pike says. In those cases, it may be dubbed orthorexia, a non-clinical term for an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.
When long-term eating obsessions, food fears or weight worries cause chronic stress, they can set you up for the very thing you’re spending so much energy trying to avoid: weight gain. “When we are highly stressed, we have higher cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone, and when the stress hormone is so high over long periods of time, it can cause us to hold onto weight or gain weight,” Pike says.
What’s more, we tend to eat more when we’re stressed — and more of unhealthy foods like chips, cookies and other refined carbs and sugar, says Dr. Tiffany Lowe-Payne, an osteopathic physician and obesity specialist in North Carolina. “When people eat sweets or carbs, it increases serotonin,” improving mood, she says. “Short-term, it makes the person feel better, but ultimately, it creates a vicious cycle.”
[See: 8 Unexpected Signs You’re Stressed.]
Bryan understands this phenomenon firsthand. When her husband (who was not the man she met in college) died four years ago, the weight piled back on. “I thought, ‘I’m getting steadily fatter and I’m a widow and I just don’t know what to do about it,” she says. “One day I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute, you’ve already written book on this topic — what’s the matter with you?’ So I realized … that the function of food for me at that moment was not nourishment, it was narcotic.” For her, the solution was to cut out the foods she was using to numb the pain (flour, dairy, sugar and chocolate) and focus on foods that would physically nourish her instead. “Instantaneously, my eating returned completely to normal; I was content,” she says.
While Bryan’s approach doesn’t work for everyone, these expert tips for reducing food-related anxiety and managing stress-related eating can:
1. Disconnect.
Food stress, like body stress, is rampant these days in large part due to social media. “We’ve taken on a toxic mindset that our life is somehow a performance; we believe that we have to be sure our lives appear better than they are to our herd,” Bryan says. As Pike puts it, “Most people don’t say, ‘Wow, I’m really having a mediocre life. It’s not that great but whatever.'” So until they do, limit — or cut yourself off from — social media use that brings you down, as well as websites, magazines and anything else bombarding you with mixed nutrition messages, Pike recommends.
2. Consider your values.
Are you avoiding social situations because you’re afraid that you won’t be able to eat healthy, even though you value relationships? Are you spending all your time at work looking up paleo recipes, even though you value doing well in your career? If so, consider acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, which helps people “learn discreet techniques that allow them to eat and live in service of their values, rather than in service of their urges or anxiety or anger,” Pike says. The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science keeps a directory of practitioners.
3. Meditate.
Whether you’re stressed about food, work or money, a practice like meditation is key for allowing your body to settle into a parasympathetic state, or the “rest and digest system” that’s the opposite of the cortisol-spiking response. Don’t try to stop all stress and anxiety, Pike says, but manage it by doing activities like meditation that make your parasympathetic symptom “more robust.”
4. Exercise.
Movement is the perfect substitute for stress eating because it triggers the same happy hormones without launching the stress-weight gain cycle. “The busier you are, the more important it is to make exercise a part of a normal routine,” Lowe-Payne says. “You can’t afford not to do it.”
[See: 7 Mind-Blowing Benefits of Exercise.]
5. Eat mindfully.
Rather than eating while your mind is elsewhere, your eyes are on the computer and your hand is shoveling food in mindlessly, try eating slowly and distraction-free. If you’re feeling stressed while eating, your body will shuttle blood away from digestion and toward your heart and brain in order to help you “fight or flee” from the perceived threat. That’s why stress and anxiety can also make you lose your appetite, says Pike, pointing out that that same response helped your ancestors run away from real threats (like tigers, not doughnuts) without needing to stop for a snack along the way. “You don’t want to be digesting food when you’re trying not to become food,”she says.
6. Replace short-term comfort with long-term nourishment.
If you find yourself reaching for potato chips under stress, first understand that your body is asking for a mood boost in the form of carbs, then choose to answer the call with a healthier option, like whole grains, Lowe-Payne suggests. “It’s about making better food choices, but being intentional,” she says.
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Is Food Stress Making You Fat? originally appeared on usnews.com
