How To Stop The Vicious Cycle of Stress Eating?

Answer 1

I overeat because I’m stressed, and I’m stressed because I overeat.

Do you identify with the above statement? It seems like a joke, but it’s an honest issue that many of us have faced before, if not struggling with right now.

When we’re stressed, we tend to overeat, and when we overeat because of stress, it’s not just that we feel ashamed about the food we just finished, but our brains are actually put in a dysfunctional state that encourages even more emotional eating. This is because emotional eating triggers certain hormones that signal nutritional deficiency, and can inhibit the synthesis of emotion-lifting neurotransmitters such as serotonin. This deficiency contributes to our low mood levels and inability to cope with stress, further provoking the vicious cycle of emotional eating.

Here is a more complete picture of this process (*or if you’d just like to read my solution, scroll down to subsection “The Solution To Stopping Stress Eating”):

How Low Stomach Acidity Contributes to Stress

The role of stomach acid in depressive symptoms is an interesting one — while it’s hard to argue against the fact that the food we eat has an impact on our mental health, most individuals don’t really think about how it’s also about how we digest and breakdown this food that plays a vital role in our emotions.

Having an acidic stomach environment is incredibly important to how we absorb nutrients from our food — if our pH isn’t low enough, instead of deriving and utilizing essential vitamins and minerals found in our food, it causes inflammation.

The inflammatory response triggers stress hormones which encourage overeating, and we are also left malnourished because of improper digestion. This malnutrition impacts the way neurotransmitters are synthesized in two ways, worsening symptoms in individuals who are already under stress.

1. Amino Acids

Most neurotransmitters are built using amino acids. For example, the amino acids phenylalanin and tryptophan are used to create the neurotransmitter serotonin, also known as one of the “happiness” neurotransmitters, for its ability to elevate our mood.

If we have low stomach acid, we suffer from improper breakdown of protein, malabsorption of essential amino acids, and subsequently neurotransmitter deficiency, as there is nothing to synthesize the neurotransmitters with. When we lack mood-elevating neurotransmitters like serotonin, we are led to depressive symptoms (Wright 2001).

2) Vitamin B12

In a similar vein, low stomach acidity means that our bodies might not be deriving important vitamins in adequate quantities. In particular, vitamin B12 plays a critical function in building and metabolizing neurotransmitters.

Vitamin B12 deficiency has been correlated with depression in multiple observational studies — an interesting case study illustrates a patient who was treated with antidepressant and antipsychotic medication for months, before being checked for any nutritional deficiencies. The woman suffered from lethargy and excessive crying for years, but within two months of B12 treatment she returned to her baseline level of mood, with no follow-up treatment required (Berry, Sagar, and Tripathi 2003).

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