Stress and Your Diet

How do your eating habits affect the way you handle stress? How does stress affect your dietary preferences? Whichever angle you focus on, food and stress are interrelated. Food doesn’t necessarily have to be your only coping mechanism for stress however. You can manage daily pressures in a variety of other ways.

Three Ways that Food and Stress Connect

• Your over-eating or under-eating tendencies surface when you are under stress. Your blood sugar level takes the toll either way. Severe mood swings result, and you end up compounding the present problem as well as your stress level. Like many people, maybe you haven’t realized yet how food can harm you! Stress management begins with awareness. You must know precisely what you need to change in your food preferences or dietary habits.

• Food is not the cure, but it can help you manage your stress. Supply your body with nutritious food. Proper dieting can sustain your body with the energy required to overcome stressful experiences. Consuming fatty food and sugar-filled treats alone doesn’t really help you much. In fact, you’ll end up feeling more exhausted, more anxious and grouchier than ever. You need more than those to combat stress.

• The right foods fortify the immune system. Stressful situations weaken it. A weak immune system is more prone to contacting diseases, bacteria and viruses. Studies prove that with proper food intake, you can make your immune system healthy and strong. It isn’t difficult to see what the studies are driving at: You have to eat right in order to feel great!

Stress and Diet

The connection between food and stress is so obvious and hard to miss. The kind of foods you consume directly affects the way you feel, think and react. Poor food choices and either over-eating or under-eating subject both your body and mind to more strain. If you want to manage your stress, try starting with your diet. Evaluate what you eat, how much you eat and how often you eat. Then, gradually introduce changes to your lifestyle.

Beyond Dieting

While the right food allows you to cope with stressful experiences more effectively, it isn’t enough. Try pairing a good diet with the following strategies:

• Get enough sleep. Seven to eight hours is ideal.
• Find time to relax.
• Establish a support group.
• Accept your limitations.
• Work and live life with a plan in mind.
• Learn to say “No” from time to time.

Healthy dieting coupled with the above steps can empower you to manage daily pressures well and take better control of your life. Say goodbye to stressed out days. Say hello to a lighter, happier you.