THE STRESS EFFECT
Stress is another factor that promotes the reinforcement of these unhealthy patterns. We don’t need a scientific study to tell us that many people eat when they’re stressed to distract themselves from the situation and help themselves relax. The trouble is, chronic stress (whether it stems from anxiety or worry, lack of sleep, over-exercise, or poor nutritional habits) is driving us—via our biology—to overeat.
Stress affects the activation of reward pathways and impairs your attempts to control your eating habits. Did you catch that?
Stress makes it even harder for us to resist our cravings.
When you are under stress, the urge to “pleasure eat” (eating for reward) is strong—and you are far more likely to overeat. Stress also causes you to change the type of foods you eat, moving away from healthier choices toward—you guessed it—highly palatable foods that are sweet, salty, and high in fat. (Who craves grilled chicken and steamed broccoli when they’re stressed?) And when you finally, inevitably, indulge, one thing is true:
Eating sugary, salty, fatty foods makes you feel less stressed.
This works via the same old mechanism we’ve been talking about—dopamine and opioid pathways in the brain. We experience stress, we eat the cookies, and we really do feel better.
This creates two problems, however. The first is that, during stress, these strong opioid and dopamine responses in the reward center of your brain promote the encoding of habits. Future stress triggers you to remember the relief you experienced the last time you ate those cookies. Memories of these responses are stored in your brain and you quickly establish a learned behavior—a “want” for more cookies. Which means that the next time you’re stressed, you’ll find yourself automatically reaching for the cookies.
CRANKY COOKIE
Stress eating can promote habit-driven overeating even in the absence of active stress. So as a result of the stress-related habits you’ve created, you may find yourself reaching for the cookies when you’re feeling tired, cranky, or just kind of down. (Remember, cravings are strongly tied to emotion.) Over time, as your brain continues to create new links between “cookie” and “feeling better,” the association—and your wanting for more—only continues to grow stronger.
The last nail in your stress-cookie coffin: The stressed brain expresses both a strong drive to eat and an impaired capacity to inhibit eating. You may not even want to eat the cookie, but because your ability to not eat it is impaired, you sort of have to. You tell yourself you’ll have only one, but under stress, you’ll probably end up eating the whole bag—which, in turn, makes you pretty stressed-out.
It’s a vicious cycle—and you probably didn’t even realize you were stuck in it.
Until now.
Of course, we can’t always eliminate stress in our lives—that half of the equation may, unfortunately, be here to stay. Our only recourse is to concentrate on the other half by eliminating the foods that play into this unhealthy stress response.
Not coincidentally, they’re the same highly processed, supernormally stimulating, non-nutritive foods that have been causing us trouble all along.
It’s all the same story.
GET ME OUT OF HERE
By now you probably agree that the food you eat shouldn’t mess with your head. You may even be a little bit mad at the way some of the things you’ve been eating have manipulated you into cravings and overconsumption. And we bet if we said, “Let’s kick all of these sneaky, tricky foods off our plates forever and eat only naturally delicious, nutritious, satiety-inducing foods,” you’d probably throw up your hands and say, “Hurrah!” Theoretically, that is. There’s just one small problem with this plan.
These unhealthy foods are really hard to give up.
First, it’s difficult to radically change your diet when you have so many powerful emotional associations with the foods you’re eating—especially if you’re eating as a coping mechanism, instead of from hunger.
Second, these foods are designed to be hard to give up. Through the misuse of biological and natural cues, our modern technology has made these foods supernormally stimulating, rewiring the reward, emotion, and pleasure pathways in our brains to create an artificial demand for more. And when we tell you which foods are the worst offenders, which ones you’ll be kicking to the curb, that’s when the real trouble will start.
You may panic.
You may think, “No way can I do this.”
You may say to yourself, “I cannot live without [fill in food].”
We assure you, you can. And you will. We’ll walk you through it. And when you’re done, three things will happen.
First, you will once again be able to appreciate the natural, delicious flavors (including sweet, fatty, and salty) found in whole foods.
Second, the pleasure and reward you experience when eating that delicious food will once again be closely tied with good nutrition, satiation, and satiety—you’ll be able to stop eating because you’re satisfied, not just because you’re “full.”
Third, you will never again be controlled by your food.
Freedom.
THE SCIENCE-Y SUMMARY
The food choices you make should promote a healthy psychological response.
Sweet, fatty, and salty tastes send pleasure and reward signals to the brain. In nature, these signals were designed to lead us to valuable nutrition and survival.
Today, these flavor sensations are unnaturally concentrated in food, which is simultaneously stripped of valuable nutrition.
This creates food-with-no-brakes—supernormally stimulating, carbohydrate-dense, nutrient-poor foods with all the pleasure and reward signals to keep us overeating, but none of the satiety signals to tell us to stop.
These foods rewire pleasure, reward, and emotion pathways in the brain, promoting hard-to-resist cravings and automatic consumption. Stress and inadequate sleep only reinforce these patterns.
Reconnecting delicious, rewarding food with the nutrition and satiety that nature intended is the key to changing these habits.