How to Control Stress Eating: Step by Step

Stress eating can derail us from reaching our goals but it’s not just a lack of willpower. Discover why we love food so much, what patterns keep us stuck, and ultimately how to over come through a 10-step process.

Throughout the week you do well, work through some hard times, plan your meals, even hit your workouts…you’ve stuck with it.

Then Friday afternoon rolls around and the week of stress, work, kids, etc, and you pass your favorite bakery (or maybe milkshake place) and you find yourself stopping and grabbing a treat.

Of course, it tastes amazing, but quickly you regret your decision.

Only to find the next few days you keep falling into the same pattern.

Then it’s Monday again and you’re ready to take on the world.

If you’re like me this can be a recurring pattern whether it’s the weekend or those afternoon slumps at 3 o’clock and you see donuts sitting there on the counter so you grab one…Only to feel after that you let yourself down.

Regardless of when we get off plan, it is often the food cravings that pop up, sometimes out of the blue, that derail us and we find that we’re struggling to stick with our healthy eating plan.

It’s Not Just Your Lack Of Willpower

Too often we feel like we give in to our cravings because we don’t have enough willpower.

Or even that we’ve failed at our “dieting” attempts to lose and keep weight off because we’re not disciplined enough.

But that’s not it…

Most of the time it’s because you’re battling biology.

Eating food—along with drinking water, having sex, feeling safe, and being liked, are the fundamental drivers of motivation and behavior.

It’s because those things help humans stay alive.

Food = Not starving
Water = Not dying of thirst
Sex = Repopulating the human race
Being safe = Not dying
Being liked = Having a community to keep us safe rather than having to survive on your own

But when it comes to food, Stephen Guyenet in his book The Hungry Brain” mentioned two things specifically that drive our behavior to eat more.

1. Calories – Because calories are the energy that keeps us alive
2. Preferences and flavor – Because we as humans like food! And some foods and flavors even trigger overeating so that we eat more…Why? So that we can survive. An example of this is sugar. It gives us quick energy, and hits of dopamine so we eat more to get more energy or store energy for later use.

So if you think of the foods that are our “go-to” foods or ones that derail you, they usually are packed full of amazing flavors as well as calories.

Example – Broccoli vs ice cream

Broccoli, though some people enjoy it, for most doesn’t hold a candle to something like ice cream as far as the desire to eat and continue to eat.

Broccoli isn’t packed with tons of flavors or calories. But ice cream or any other thing like that is. The sugar, combined with milk and other ingredients make it a superb food for our brain to desire.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be ice cream— it could be things that are salty, sweet, crunchy, umami, sour, or any combination of those.

The more we eat it, the more we reinforce that it’s exciting and feels good to eat that food, and we start to form habits and even addictive behaviors toward those foods.

Why You Like Food So Much (And why it’s hard to say no)

To break through our cravings we first have to understand some of how behavior works and why we like food…

When we eat food, particularly super tasty calorie-rich foods like ice cream, chocolate, chips, candy bars, etc… the textures, amazing flavor, and loads of calories we get give our brain a nice hit of dopamine.

Dopamine is the thing that tells our brain that we like something. We use dopamine to learn. So we eat food that we like, and we learn that it is good food for survival…again, eating helps us stay alive.

And when something happens that you enjoy and feels good, the brain wants to increase the likelihood that we will continue to get that thing that made us feel good… again so it increases the likelihood that we stay alive.

Now the brain cannot conjure up food on its own to make us feel good. So it starts to pay attention and connects what we were doing or experiencing before we got the food with getting the food that made us feel good.

For example, when you grab a pastry from your favorite bakery on the way home or get your favorite snack from the vending machine on your way back from the bathroom…Your brain connects the dots.

And then it wants us to do that thing you were doing before again, and again, and again so that we can get that pastry or snack every time.

It realizes that the road you were driving on that leads to a pastry. Or that going to the bathroom and walking past the vending machine leads to a snack.

So you will then tend to do the behavior more often that leads to getting the pastry or candy bar.… (i.e. find a reason to take that way home, take a break and walk the same way past the vending machine)

So whatever you’re doing when the dopamine hits, you’re more likely to repeat it when the same situation arises again.

Your Brain Is A Party Animal!

One important thing to understand is that our brains are like party animals…meaning they always want to feel good.

And when they don’t feel good they will seek ways to feel good.

But it can’t always just produce its own dopamine to feel better.

This is why when we’re stressed, or bored, or angry, or anxious or any other emotion we know that we want to feel better.

Which leads us to seek behaviors to feel better like eating food or drinking alcohol, or anything else that feels good. It’s a coping mechanism.

Now we’ve mentioned lots of environmental examples going on around us, but it could also be emotions you were experiencing, thoughts you were having, or people you were with that lead up to you getting that hit of dopamine.

Those people, thoughts, and emotions then become associated with certain behaviors like eating food.

Because our brain wants us to feel good and stay alive whenever we’re feeling or exercising less than optimal— and learns to automatically turn to food to feel better.

Creating the habit or even addictive cycle of using food to cope with stress and emotions.

— Very fascinating side note – This is super interesting when it comes to chronic fatigue, pain, anxiety, and stress as well – If you have pain, low energy, stress etc, and use something to resolve that unpleasant feeling (energy drinks, pain killers, stress eating, etc thing that makes us feel good). Your body will not only encourage the behaviors you were doing before you got the “feel-good” but also make you feel the way you felt before you got the pleasure.

So if you feel pain and cope by using something to feel better. Your brain will create more pain. If you feel stress and anxiety and cope using something to feel better it will create more anxiety. If you feel tired and cope using something to feel better it will make you more tired.

So in some ways, we are actually creating chronic fatigue, chronic pain, or chronic stress and anxiety because we keep reinforcing that we need to feel those things first before we get the hit of dopamine.

Understanding Your Patterns that Make You Eat

It may be difficult to fight those biological and or even unconscious urges to eat those super tasty, calorie-rich foods if they are right in front of us. But if we can understand the cues to the craving and have a process to handle it we can be victorious over that craving without just white-knuckling it with willpower.

A cue is defined as a signal for action. So the cue for a craving is the event, circumstance, or emotion that you were experiencing right before you ate.

And when a cue is repeatedly connected with a positive outcome (i.e. you eat food), your brain makes that event, emotion, or circumstance a cue to eat.

So if you always take a certain way home and stop at a certain bakery and grab something… taking that route home is the cue to stop at the bakery.

In other words, it becomes a pattern or what we’d think of as a habit.

How To Be In Control Permanently

So obviously doing this once will help you get through that moment but will not change you forever. But imagine you did this every time a craving popped up or a cue for food.

Instead of just mindlessly giving in to food, or mindlessly driving down that road and stopping at that fast food place… several things would start to happen.

1. First, you’d be far more intentional about your decisions and understand why you do the things you do.
2. We start thinking before we act— which sounds funny but this is getting less and less common. And has become a really big problem in derailing us from our health goals.
3. You start creating neuroplasticity, which we won’t cover in depth here but is our brain’s ability to change and rewire. Kind of like a muscle. The more you stimulate a muscle it changes. You get stronger, faster, more able to use it, more coordinated with it etc. Our brain is the same way.
4. The more you repeat the process the more the brain rewires to go down a different path instead of the one that has kept us stuck.
5. By doing healthy things to resolve the real triggers, not only do you stop giving into emotional eating which often helps us lose and maintain weight. But we will become a much more emotionally healthy and intelligent person.

And the cool part is — it works.

Get Yourself An Accountability Partner

One thing we’ve found incredibly helpful when we work with our clients is to have accountability. Not only does that help them lose weight faster but it helps them be able to bounce thoughts and emotions off to help you work through all of this. Our average result is 20-45 LBS in 6 weeks.

Now, go print off these steps, grab a journal, and let’s get to work!