Stress and Eating

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Introduction

Stress, a state of tension and anxiety, can have a significant impact on an individual's body, impacting many important functions, including eating. The relationship between stress and food is not solely emotional. Instead, an individual's relationship with food under stress is based on their emotions in combination with chemical attributes and their surrounding environment. This relationship is so important to understand, as the stress of eating may be causing more stress and health problems.

Stressors and the Biological Response to Stress

Stressors

How the Stress is Perceived

When altering eating habits in response to stress, it is important to consider the perception of the stressor. When stress is viewed as a threat that could result in negative consequences, danger, or harm, it causes panic and an increase in cortisol production. Threats alter other physiological responses in the body, including increased heart rate, blood flow, and blood pressure. These changes send the body into a state of shock, commonly known as the fight-or-flight response, adjusted by the sympathetic nervous system, and therefore food is no longer a priority. It is plausible that in a fight-or-flight state, the individual's perception as a whole may change, which is why their hunger cues may be altered. However, stress that is viewed as a challenge does not have this same impact, as it causes individuals to think through how to solve the problem, and appetite is not nearly as impacted. Stress that is perceived as a threat will likely decrease an individual's appetite, while challenging stress will have little to no impact on hunger and the eating patterns of the person.

Impact of Academic Stress

Academic stress, whether it be chronic or acute, influences the chemicals related to an individual's eating and chemical balance. A study was conducted by Michael Emond and others on his team to show the impact of different situations on individuals who were either identified as stress under-eaters or stress over-eaters. They found that individuals' identified eating patterns were only proven significant under academic stress, meaning individuals only exemplified the trait of under-eating or over-eating in the presence of academic stress. The research compared the individuals' food consumption under three different conditions: control, attachment stress, and academic stress. Under the control and attachment stress conditions, under-eaters and over-eaters did not show a significant difference in the consumption of their food. By revealing that academic stress conditions did show a difference, it is proven that different stressors do have a different impact on eating, and that academic stress is a significant stressor (Emond, 2016).

Emond's study can be explained by the fact that academic stress can be short-term or long-term. As analyzed in the research of Tanja Adam and Elissa Epel, individuals who identified themselves as stress eaters had higher levels of cortisol and insulin during a stressful period compared to a control period. They note that, "It is possible that the stress eaters have underlying high stress reactivity, which promotes their overeating, although this has not been tested directly". Even though they cannot directly prove this theory, it is understandable that those who eat in the presence of stress have long-term stress. As explained later, the impact of long-term stress is often seen through an increased production of cortisol, which increases an individual's desire to eat. This may explain why academic stress is seen in relation to a tendency to overeat or eat without feeling hungry. Additionally, there is a potential correlation between students who struggle with academic stress long-term and their desire to eat despite lacking hunger cues.

Impact of Attachment Stress

Individuals who experienced attachment stress, when they did not feel secure in the relationships they possessed, all tended to consume more food, regardless of how they previously categorized themselves. This reaction could be due to the fact that these individuals did not feel they had a community that they could rely upon, so they resorted to using food—a stable aspect of their life—to provide them the comfort (as later disclosed in the paper) they desperately desired and required. They lacked, or felt that they lacked, a genuine support system, which forced them to adopt unhealthy eating habits (Emond et al., 2016).

The Biological Response to Stress

Our bodies are consistently at work with a goal to maintain allostasis, which is a balance of equilibrium. Finding internal equilibrium changes an individual's energy flow, altering bodily functions, including appetite and energy storage. While finding allostasis, the body regulates functions of the central nervous system, which can include changes in heart rate, appetite, and metabolism (Adam, 2007). Finding this internal balance and state of allostasis is important not only for the maintenance of weight, but for the individual's body to function as a whole. Corticotropin-releasing hormones, which are located in the hypothalamus and brainstem, initiate the reaction to stress. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) is a system that is activated when reacting to stress. The system impacts the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal cortex, all of which are systems related to food and decisions about food (Yau, 2013). The HPA plays a crucial role in activating and releasing a variety of hormones that alter the body's reaction to stress, which include those that impact an individual's desire, or lack thereof, to eat.

Short Term Stress

For short-term stress, the nervous system sends messages to adrenal glands to produce adrenaline. Adrenaline causes the "fight-or-flight" response, which pushes thoughts of food out of the individual's head ("Why Stress Causes", 2021). The sympathetic adrenal medullary system is activated primarily and releases catecholamines which contain adrenaline and noradrenaline (Yau, 2013). The "fight-or-flight" response, commonly how stress is thought to be responded to, is only the response when the individual feels an immediate or instant feeling of stress.

Long Term Stress

However, long-term or chronic stress has a different impact on food, and food becomes more desirable. For long-term stress, the nervous system promotes the production of cortisol in the adrenal glands, which triggers an increased appetite and motivation to eat. Cortisol increases appetite and the motivation to eat ("Why Stress Causes", 2021). Prolonged and frequent activation of the HPA can alter eating-related hormones, glucose, and more that may have a negative impact on eating as well (Yau, 2013). This long-term impact of stress is often overlooked, but it is important to recognize the impact that stress can have on more than just the emotional aspect of life. While stress takes a mental toll, it takes a physical toll as well. This impact is important for chronically stressed individuals to consider, as food may no longer be fuel, but a reward.

Emotional Under-eating

Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder resulting from severe dietary restriction or weight-loss behaviors, body image disturbance, intense fear of gaining weight, and strict self-evaluation (Widiger & Gore, 2014). Individuals with AN perceive themselves as overweight but, in fact, may be underweight. AN patients experience physiological, cognitive, and emotional dysfunction.

Socio-cultural Factors

1. Cultural change

Socio-environmental factors such as the change in residence and culture are associated with the development of AN. Many low-income and middle-income families experienced an abrupt social and cultural change during increased industrialization and globalization (Zipfel et al., 2015). Specifically, access to the internet connects nations around the world and dramatically expedites the spread of knowledge and information. Individuals are exposed to new cultures and opportunities that they could not access without the innovation and popularization of technology. However, if individuals cannot adapt to the faster, ever-changing digital world, they might feel lagged by society. Therefore, they might employ unhealthy eating habits as a coping mechanism, which brings challenges and risks to AN.

2. Social change

International migration occurs with globalization, which exposes people to novel ideas from different cultural backgrounds. People who move to western countries encounter "new nutritional habits and thin ideal internalization" (Zipfel et al., 2015). Some of them, experiencing more pressure from the environment, change their daily habits to conform to the standardized lifestyle. This shift in habitual patterns or maladjustment in new environments increases the risk of AN because they might be initially goal-oriented but gradually become compulsive to diet restriction. Constantly feeling unsatisfied about their shape and weight, individuals maintain an unfavorable habitual pattern of eating that leads to negative consequences on physical and psychological health. This progression from a "voluntary hedonically driven choice" to a "compulsive, uncontrolled behavior pattern" is similar to the development of substance abuse. Individuals become "addicted" to the disrupted eating habits and the obsession with thinness, which maintain their unhealthy lifestyle that progresses into AN. Nevertheless, some researchers do not identify "thin ideal internalization" as a risk factor of AN, because the pursuit of thinness is popular among many nations, but the worldwide population of AN patients is relatively low compared to other life-threatening diseases. One plausible explanation is that the tendency of diet control and excessive exercise does not directly cause AN but increases the risk of AN in those with genetic susceptibility (Zipfel et al., 2015).

3. Stigma related to obesity

Stigma related to obesity accounts for the psychological factors that induce AN. According to Puhl & Suh, obesity or excessive weight correlates to the negative stereotypes of personality such as laziness, lack of self-control, and gluttony (2015). Mass media, such as television, Twitter, and Instagram, spreads and reinforces the stigma related to obesity. These media function as stressors that shape the ideology of individuals at any stage of life. Individuals, feeling the psychological burden from the media, inhibit nutrition intake to avoid negative judgments related to obesity or excessive body mass. Mass media also enforces a stigmatizing concept of obesity in adolescents. With the popularization of electronic devices, weight-related stereotypes present in children's media content are influencing children's concept of body weight at an early age (Puhl & Suh, 2015). This weight stigma perpetuates in children's ideology and further exacerbates during the development of children. It is not surprising that adolescence, the time at which judgment and self-concept are most susceptible to socio-environmental factors, is the most common time for the onset of AN (Jagielska, Kacperska, 2017).

In addition to the self-concept, obesity-related stigma also influences the larger population that might increase the risk of AN or induce further adverse experiences on AN patients. Individuals who discriminate against obese people may demonstrate their malice via verbal attack or overt aggression. According to Puhl & Suh, individuals with obesity or excessive body weight suffer increased harassment, discrimination, and weight-related teasing (2015). These adverse experiences against the individuals increase their psychological stress and uneasiness, and they attribute the cause of those experiences to their body shape and related eating behaviors. Therefore, they hold a more negative self-image, which increases the likelihood of "depressive symptoms, low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, psychological distress, as well as increased substance use" (2015). The negative experience with weight bias enhances the tendency of psychological maladjustment that diminishes the capacity for individuals to cope with stress and increases the rate of AN (Puhl & Suh, 2015). Furthermore, obesity-related stigma could cause further harm to the psychological health of individuals with AN because they endure constant uneasiness and fear of being negatively evaluated by family, colleagues, friends, and others. A study has shown that individuals with AN encounter considerable social rejection due to their stereotype of being "boring, weak, self-destructive, psychologically vulnerable, and having less desirable traits" (Puhl & Suh, 2015). Feeling less accepted by groups, AN patients might find themselves incapable of coping with the situation. Therefore, they would endure more stress in daily interpersonal interaction and maintain their disordered eating habits as a coping mechanism.

In addition to the external criticism and discrimination related to weight bias, individuals might encounter self-judgment and self-criticism. Social stigma around obesity causes stress for individuals who negatively evaluate themselves as deviating from the standardized shape. The idealization of thinness may further drive individuals to pursue extreme body shapes using intense dietary control. This overvaluation of body shape and weight is associated with shame because one desires positive evaluation from both oneself and others. Disordered eating habits enable AN patients to feel "safe, accepted, and valued" because they pursue a "socially valued body image". Nevertheless, emphasizing eating behaviors and appearance would not lead to a "more valued sense of self" but rather "maladaptive self-monitoring and self-correction". In order to keep feeling acceptable attitudes about themselves, AN patients adopt a disordered eating strategy that is innately destructive to their physiological health. Meanwhile, they exercise excessively and criticize themselves for consuming food. This tendency of maladaptive self-monitoring results in the maintenance of AN in affected individuals. Therefore, it is important to help AN patients adjust their self-judgment tendencies and construct an undisturbed perception of self-image in relation to the social standard.

Solutions for Emotional Under-eating

A multitude of websites have published information and aid pages focused on helping individuals cope with their stress and handle the effects of emotional eating. The awareness that is being created out of this issue, as well as the mass dissemination of information, is incredibly beneficial to the public, as it provides aid to individuals who cannot afford professional help or do not know how to access the resources they require. In 2020, Akili King posted an article for Vogue titled, "How Stress Can Cause a Loss of Appetite—And 5 Ways to Handle it," where she created a multifaceted plan to combat stress under-eating. She writes her advice into the following five-step, easy, and quick-to-read plan:

1. Set a Schedule
2. Embrace Therapy
3. Focus on Easy-to-Digest Foods
4. Make Eating Fun
5. Practice Gratitude

By not providing much scientific research, offering a sufficient amount of explanation to understand her point but not over-explaining the concept, and accentuating the main ideas, she reduces her analysis into a palatable resource at the disposal of the public (King, 2020).

Emotional Over-eating

Why People Overeat When Experiencing Stress

When someone experiences longer-term stress, the amount of cortisol released increases, and there is a greater sense of hunger and motivation. Biologically, chronic stress can make an individual more susceptible to disease and weight gain, as in order to prioritize the stress response, the body deprioritizes and impairs other vital functions such as food digestion (O'Donnell, 2015, p. 6). Cortisol, the stress hormone, plays a big role in the scientific and biological explanation for what happens when someone experiences long-term stress and, as a result, experiences binging. Cortisol, released by the adrenal glands, is an exogenous glucocorticoid, which is a type of hormone that increases people's food consumption, which can potentially result in obesity. Insulin, when combined with cortisol, also shifts from being stored in cells for energy to fat in the abdominal area (O'Donnell, 2015, p. 15). O'Donnell (2015) explains that subsequent weight gain simultaneously worsens body fitness and the effects of stress by negatively affecting cardiovascular health (Prentice, 2013, p. 8).

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Emotional Eating

In 2013, Talbot, Maguen, Epel, Metzler, and Neylan conducted a study with ninety-three participants possessing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to explore the relationship between PTSD and emotional eating. The researchers found that because of the chronic stress associated with PTSD, individuals with the disorder are more likely to not only be obese but also to develop other conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. Veterans in particular with PTSD experienced weight gain following discharge.

Individuals who have also experienced trauma in their childhood are at a greater risk in adulthood of emotionally eating because of the possibility of PTSD. Victims of sexual abuse also behave in the same manner. In 2008, Holzer, Uppala, Wonderlich, Crosby, and Simonich's seventy-five participants who were victims of sexual abuse but may not have been formally diagnosed with PTSD were compared to a control group. The researchers found that the experimental group scored higher in three of the Eating Disorder Examination categories—restraint, eating concern, and shape concern. The participants also exhibited clear symptoms of PTSD. Due to the fact that sexual abuse is often accompanied by PTSD, which in turn is often accompanied by eating disorders, sexual trauma is also intrinsically related to unhealthy eating behaviors by association. PTSD is inherently related to unhealthy eating patterns due to the chronic stress an individual experiences as a result.

Comfort Food

Comfort Food and Food Addiction

People who struggle with emotional eating or binge eating tend to consume a lot of unhealthy "comfort" foods because of the increase in cortisol, insulin, and ghrelin in response to stress. Popular unhealthy "comfort" foods are a reliable source for taking your mind off of other things impacting your life. Especially for individuals who have not developed tools to manage their stress, consuming comfort foods is a form of coping.

The term "comfort food" provides for a stressed person precisely what is expected: relatively quick consolation. In fact, when stressed, some individuals' bodies actually crave foods with higher fat and sugar contents. This reaction is a result of an internal response to opioid release and sequential dopamine. In O'Donnell's (2015) studies conducted with both rats and humans, it was found that this response actually operates twofold, meaning inhibiting this release can decrease an individual's craving for unhealthy food without impacting their appetite (O'Donnell, 2015, p. 10). Once the desired food is consumed, stress is lessened by the body triggering another response in the reward system (O'Donnell, 2015, p. 10). Prolonged stress can strengthen the reward system and lead to stronger urges to consume unhealthy foods (O'Donnell, 2015, p. 19). Simply stated, stress seems to encourage unhealthy eating because it is a successful coping tool. Yet, this precarious routine of relying on or using food, whether inborn due to cravings or as a deliberate choice to improve mood, is detrimental to physical health and long-term mental health.

Using food as a means to control stress provides immediate relief, but it does not work to cure the source of stress; in fact, the chronic stress will not only persist by further establishing a reliance on these comfort foods but also possibly worsen without implementing proper coping methods. Thus, individuals who have yet to recognize that they are consistently experiencing stress or refuse to pursue alternative coping methods fall into a cycle of food dependence—a phenomenon that can lead to food addiction.

According to Prentice (2013), food addiction is considered a substance dependence due to its ability to better an individual's mood, a response that is similar to how certain other drugs operate (Prentice, 2013, p. 37). It also satisfies the criteria for substance dependence:

"Tolerance, withdrawal, using more of the substance than intended, persistent desire or unsuccessful attempts to control or reduce use, expending significant effort acquiring or recovering from use, experiencing use as interfering with important social obligations, and continuing use despite known harmful consequences, and that substance use to be associated with significant distress or impairment, and at least three of seven symptoms within one year" (O'Donnell, 2015, p. 17).

Comfort Food and Its Emotional Implications

The dynamic of the relationship between comfort food and stress is exemplified by a study (O'Connor et al., 2008) that examines what drives people to engage in emotional eating. In this study, "daily hassles," or more specifically, "ego-threatening, interpersonal" hassles were shown to increase snacking and emotional eating. Subjects ate fewer real meals and vegetables and snacked more when they were stressed. These findings indicate a pathway by which too much comfort eating can reinforce unhealthy eating habits. It shows how the stress-eating relationship works. When an individual is stressed out, they turn to unhealthy snacks, and if they continue to rely on this habit to make themselves feel better, then that might lead to major health risks later in life.

In a study (Franja, 2021) that examined how emotions affected snacking, the findings supported the claim that comfort food is not only an overall unhealthy behavior but also that it may not be as effective as society claims. This study examined a large sample of adults and tracked their food intake and mood over a period of fourteen days, specifically focusing on their affect before and after a snack. What the researchers found was that in the hours leading up to an unhealthy snack (high in energy foods), affect decreased significantly, whereas with the hours leading up to a healthy snack (fruits/vegetables/nuts), the effect remained relatively stable. In the hours following an unhealthy snack, affect continued to decrease, whereas affect improved greatly after a healthy snack. These findings support the idea that healthy food is beneficial for both physical and mental health, as it appears to lead to an increase in mood after consumption. Conversely, the findings support the idea that unhealthy snacks, which are what comfort foods mostly manifest themselves as, are correlated with negative affect after consumption. Not only that, but the study suggests that a decrease in mood also increases an individual's tendency to gravitate toward unhealthier snacking options.

The popular convention is that comfort foods make you feel better when you are stressed. But actually, they worsen the effect after consumption and reinforce the scientific claim that chronic stress is tied to health problems like obesity and diabetes. Another implication is that it would be more conducive to physical and emotional health for an individual to have healthier snacking options when stressed, because they genuinely improve affect.

Combating Food Addiction and Preferences for Comfort Foods

Dependence on unhealthy foods to regulate emotions can be avoided by anticipating stress and developing coping skills. In 2021, Pannicke and colleagues conducted a study about goal-congruence in dieting and stress. They found that in order to follow their dieting plans when stressed, the participants needed to be proactive. This conclusion stemmed from an adverse finding in the study.

The participants consisted of university students in Germany and Austria, with a majority of the population being female (seventy-two out of the total ninety). None of the individuals said that they had an eating disorder prior to enrolling in the study, and all of them were interested in starting a dieting plan. Pannicke and others found that the participants who experienced stress were less able to self-regulate and had more difficulty ignoring food cravings. Additionally, the less confident an individual was in their coping strategies, the more consistently they resorted to consuming comfort foods. From these results, the leaders of the study offered solutions for maintaining goal congruence when dieting in particular; although, these conclusions can also be applied to managing emotional eating in general.

An individual must first recognize that they are stressed in order to pursue the proper aid they need and realize if they are partaking in unhealthy food behaviors. Additionally, removing unhealthy foods from their area when they are stressed will force them to try stress relievers, instead of becoming food-dependent. Thus, stress is not truly the core factor that influences unhealthy eating patterns, emotional eating, and food addiction, but rather it is the lack of reliable coping skills that is to blame. Developing these tools will generate a healthier relationship with food, more control over urges, better methods to alleviate stress, and improve overall mental health.

Without proper stress treatment, a food-addicted individual can undergo the same bodily reactions as a drug-addicted individual, including withdrawal and inability to regulate cravings and urges. And, when a person is already experiencing chronic stress, these conditions can compound upon one another. Therefore, it is integral that an individual takes these steps prior to experiencing stress.

Binge Eating

Binge eating is defined as consuming large quantities of food without control.

Theories of Binge Eating

There are multiple theories that may explain why individuals turn to binge eating, and these all lead back to an emotional desire to escape or avoid negative emotions related to food. Two main theories, Affect Regulation theory and Escape theory, would be discussed below.

Affect Regulation theory

The Affect Regulation Model can represent why people struggle with binging. This model supports the idea that binge eating is used as a mechanism to get rid of one's negative mood. Other researchers have found that negative moods are higher before binging and lower after. They have also found that negative affect moderates the relationship between stress and binge eating. There are some inaccuracies and inconsistencies in results from previous investigations regarding the Affect Regulation Model. As a whole, the results were conclusive enough to suggest that the negative affect model correlates to why people binge eat. However, the results from studies investigating the topic do not necessarily show causation between using food consumption to manage stress or to relieve negative moods.

Escape theory

Heatherton and Baumeister's Escape Model provides reasoning for how individuals escape their negative affects. This model claims that people can reduce their self-awareness by focusing their attention on concrete aspects of their environment. A hypothetical example of how this model works involves a perfectionist, because perfectionists often hold themselves to overly high standards. When they do not reach these standards, they tend to feel as if they had shortcomings and did not achieve what they wanted, which could make it so they enter a state where they feel down about themselves, which ends up adding to their overall negative mood. The perfectionist can reduce their self-awareness so that the difference between their standards and what they actually achieved is no longer impacting them the way it usually would. More specifically, they narrow their cognitive understanding of the situation to distract from what happened. When someone is trying to use cognitive narrowing to not think about the negativity surrounding them, they may end up ignoring their usual inhibitions. Thus, they are significantly more likely to participate in more self-destructive behavior, like excessive eating. It has been reported that when people start to specifically hone in on the actions and sensations that come with eating, they start to binge. The Escape Theory supports the idea that binge eating can be caused by someone trying to fit with society's body standards, because, according to this theory, people are supposedly partaking in cognitive narrowing, which would mean that they have fewer restraints and inhibitions. They end up blaming their binging for their situation, rather than acknowledging that the underlying problem that caused them to binge is actually the cause of their stress.

Influence of Gender On Overeating

Relying on food as a stress-coping mechanism is more common in women than in men. Rather than turning to food when faced with stressors, men predominantly turn to alcohol or smoking to cope. Despite this, men do still experience binge-eating disorder and they still use it as a coping mechanism for the stressors that they experience. In general, binge eating disorder is almost as equally prevalent in both men and women.

Reward Model: Why Overeating is Likely to Occur

Behaviors related to food selection and eating are often related to how our brains will respond to the given food. As humans, there are two main reasons for eating: to maintain the body's allostasis or to reward oneself using food. Eating for body maintenance is related to hunger, as people eat to fuel their bodies. The second type of eating, food reward, is not actually eating for hunger, but rather, eating for a reward. It is important to recognize when making choices about when and what to eat to consider the reason to eat: is it due to genuine hunger, or a desire to eat? While this question may be challenging to answer, without ever limiting food intake, individuals would face many problems both related to eating and health.

Eating for fuel is important, as it gives your body energy and allows individuals to function and thrive on a daily basis. Differing from this type of eating, food rewards are based on both liking the food and the desire to eat the food. The central nervous system releases more dopamine for foods that are more desirable and liked. This concept explains why in situations where individuals can pick what they want, they choose to eat the foods that release dopamine and help them feel happy.

During a study, individuals were put into a stressful situation, which took form in a math test, and then were instructed to eat. After the stressful condition compared to control, individuals felt less satisfied after eating breakfast, despite the fact that they had fasted the same way before the meal both times. While the quantities they chose to eat were similar, participants chose to eat more carbohydrates, protein, and "energy-dense" foods in the stress condition. While the study cannot confirm that stress conditions lead to an increase in energy and carbohydrate consumption, it is probable that stress is a factor in the choices individuals make pertaining to food. The increased preference for carbohydrates is likely due to the increased desire for foods to feel rewarding. Eating foods that feel filling often act as a comfort and more desired food, which could explain why individuals made these choices.

Rewards: Stress Acts As a Drug

While eating due to stress is not the same as being addicted to a drug, the brain and body responses are fairly similar. Stress acts as negative reinforcement, and food becomes a factor in the reinforcement. Especially when the stress is uncontrollable, the negative reinforcement of it replicates a similar response to if a person was taking drugs (Yau, 2013). Individuals make choices about when to consume food and what they will consume based on the history of what they have eaten and how the brain responds to these choices. Food enacts the brain's reward system and therefore reinforces the consumption of food when stress occurs.

It becomes especially challenging to have control over eating when hyper-palatable foods are involved; these foods are foods that are pleasing to the individual and are so pleasing that they struggle to control themselves when presented with these foods (Yau, 2013). Foods, particularly those with fat and sugar, act as "comfort foods" and individuals feel and believe that these foods lessen their stress. Therefore, these desired foods are rewarding when they feel stress, and the negative reinforcement cycle continues ("Why Stress Causes", 2021). Additionally, "individuals in negative affective states have been shown to favor the consumption of hedrnically rewarding foods high in sugar and/or fat, whereas intake during happy states favor less palatable dried fruits" (Yau, 2013). It is important to note that since foods containing fat and sugar are preferred, this may be a factor in weight gain due to stress. Individuals with high stress levels who turn to foods that can cause weight gain may explain why weight gain is seen in individuals who are constantly stressed.

Positive Effect

There has been plenty of research done on the topic of how distress and negative emotions affect eating patterns, but not as much on the subject of how positive affect affects eating behavior.

Researchers in the Netherlands were curious about this same question when they conducted a study to see if positive emotions work the same way negative emotions do in developing obesity in individuals. The study (conducted on just women) was an exploration of the German word, "Kummerspeck," which means "sorrow-fat." The researchers wanted to find out if there exists such a thing as "happy-fat," if there were overweight individuals who ate in response to positive emotions.

The researchers found that positive and negative emotions did not function the same way in influencing eating behavior. They found that a tendency to eat in response to positive emotions had no association with higher BMI, whereas a tendency to eat in response to negative emotions was positively correlated with higher BMI and obesity. Those that experienced "Kummerspeck" reported a lower satisfaction with life and lower positive affect.

These findings further provide evidence for the claim that overeating in response to negative emotion is atypical behavior, because the exploitation of this behavior is associated with higher BMI and obesity. On the other hand, there is evidence that eating in response to positive emotions is actually a typical behavior, because it has no association with higher BMI, suggesting that the exploitation of the behavior does not have harmful effects on the body.

An important implication of this study is that therapies that focus on the enhancement of positive affect are unlikely to significantly increase body weight. This also adds credibility to the field of positive psychology, which concentrates more on the enhancement of positive emotion rather than the elimination of negative emotion, since it does not have to be concerned with the side effect of dealing with uncontrollable increases in weight. For example, it may explain the effectiveness of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a treatment for binge eating disorder, which aims to treat the disorder by stimulating positive emotions in patients, helping reach the goal of promoting regular eating habits without the byproduct of weight gain.

One implication about the nature of stress-induced obesity is that the nature of the emotion, in addition to the eating itself, is a critical factor in causing it. If a tendency to eat in response to positive emotions is not associated with higher BMI, but eating in response to negative emotions is, then it suggests that the obesity is influenced highly by the emotions. It may mean that to effectively treat any overeating-related health issue, not just binge eating, it is necessary to focus both on developing normal eating habits and avoiding unhealthy eating patterns while stressed, and to cater to the emotional wellbeing of the subject.

Solutions to Overeating

Erin Gager posted an article, "Tips to Manage Stress Eating," through Johns Hopkins Medicine that provided a guide for combating stress overeating. Gager emphasized the importance of timing, portion control throughout the day, and finding alternatives to unhealthy options. She made the schedule easy to adhere to by making the list small, manageable, and able to incorporate into daily life.

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