The Cycle of Stress and Snacking: SE5

The Cycle of Stress and Snacking

People in today’s world face stress every single day.  If you are a parent, you have the stress of making sure your children are taken care of, and that they are where they need to be, whether it’s football practice or school play auditions.  If you are a businessman or a politician, you are faced with extremely important decisions on a regular basis.  If you are a college student like me, you are constantly loaded with homework from different classes.  Stress is something that comes with every day life.  The question is this, however: How do we deal with stress?  I know for me, and several other people in today’s world, snacking on generally unhealthy food always seems to alleviate some of the anxiety.  

From our blog posts in class last week, I noticed that there were quite a few people who mentioned snack-type foods in their food journals, including my own.  We are all in college and are responsible to keep up our grades by getting all our work done on time and with good quality, in 3-5 classes, which is tremendously stressful.  Almost every time that I am working on a large project, an important paper, or studying for a test, I have some type of snack while I’m working.  Sometimes I eat beef jerky and cheese, or chips or candy: basically any food that is easy to snack on, tastes good, and is not overly healthy. Having something to munch on while working away is something that seems to make the overall work load more manageable.  However, this phenomenon is not a good solution when it comes to dealing with stress.  In fact, the two are very much correlated in a negative way.

An article from the Buffalo News out of Buffalo, New York gives examples and detailed information regarding the enormous amounts of stress that most Americans have on a regular basis, and how this makes us the “fattest” country in the world.  While people may think that snacking on junk foods while working on something important helps to alleviate their stress, the article approaches the fact that actually, the excessive eating due to stress circles around and creates an even higher stress level.  For example, the article gives examples of accounts from a few people in regards to their snacking habits in relation to stress.  One interviewee named Christina stated that, “You have your pizza or whatever -- it doesn't solve the problem, but at that point, because it tastes good, it seems to calm you down." This may be the case, but ultimately the stress is not alleviated at all, and unhealthy eating habits begin to form, which in turn, lead to more stress.

The article then goes on to explain how this phenomenon of using food as a reward or stress reliever has been taught to us from a very young age.  A nutrition teacher from the Sisters Hospital in Buffalo named Ms. Goeger was interviewed in the article, and said, “From day one, we cried, we got fed. That alleviation of stress is just ingrained in our personality…physical gratification is tied in with an emotional response right from the beginning.”  I can relate to this, just as most people probably can.  Whenever I got hurt, from when I was a toddler, to the time I broke my arm in 6^th grade, to my senior year when I had to get knee surgery, my parents have always taken me to get ice cream.  In these cases, it makes more sense because ice cream is something that helped to make me feel better in times when I was very upset and recovering from an injury, but it is the same idea as snacking when you’re upset. 

This fact that our country is generally over-stressed leads to our growing problem of obesity in America.  Stressors are constantly eating away at us, in work, school, and just life in general.  Turning to food is an easy way to temporarily fix our problems.  However, this seemingly harmless solution to our high stress levels is actually making our lives more stressful, and we begin for enforce unhealthy eating habits and begin to gain weight.  It is a vicious cycle: a person is stressed, so they eat.  The more they eat, the more weight they gain.  The more weight they gain, the more stressed they develop, which adds onto the stress they already had to begin with.  So they eat more, and the cycle goes on and on.  There needs to be other methods taken in regards to handling stress.  The article gives some worthy ones, including being aware of the problem, and eating when you are actually hunger, and also participating in other, healthier activities that make you happy, such as exercising, going for a walk, or playing games.  If American could steadily attempt to try other approaches when trying to help lower their stress levels, our eating practices would get better, and America would be a less-stressful, happier place. 

Sources

"What's Eating You? The Complex Connection Between Stress and Snacking." The Buffalo News (1998): 0. 16 June 1998. 14 May 2013. http://0-search.proquest.com.bianca.penlib.du.edu/docview/381355791