EATING STRESS
You hear a lot of talk about stress eating, but have you ever heard of eating stress? Probably not because I think I made it up.
I’ve made it my task this year to reduce stress in my life. Several of my health problems have stress as a primary contributing factor, so instead of working on each of them piecemeal I decided to put all of my focus on being relaxed and having fun. For someone who has spent most of her life striving to be something or someone other than who I am, just being and enjoying being is a relief.
The other day my husband had a craving for KFC. He’s on his own program with food; one day he’ll fast, the next he’ll eat cold potatoes, and after that it’s KFC and a bag of pretzels. There’s no rhyme or reason to his eating, no schedule that he follows. He just does one of those things for awhile, and then turns around and does one of the other. I’ve given up trying to understand his process. For that day, however, he was in a KFC state of mind.
As we drove home wrapped in the smell of fat and salt, with the promise of crispy chicken, fluffy biscuits, and peppery gravy I mulled over how this wasn’t healthy eating, but it wasn’t stress eating either. I certainly wasn’t feeling stressed, nor, from the looks of it, was he.
Then it hit me. I was eating stress. The fatty, salty, crispy, fluffy, and peppery food in that bag was adding stress to my body. All of the jigsaw puzzles and historical romance novels could not undo the stress that came from consuming inflammatory foods.
I finally had my motivation to eat a healthier diet.
I am long since past caring about looking fat, and my blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are good. Yes, I have migraines and an autoimmune disorder but as I was keeping them in check with medication I wasn’t willing to look at my food as a way to help myself. My entire adult life has been devoted to losing weight, and I just could not put myself through that again without some serious motivation. Intrinsic motivation, you know? Not just a doctor telling me I should, or “knowing” it would make me feel better. That was all so much blah, blah, blah.
But now that I see how much better I feel just from decreasing environmental stress in my life, I am motivated not to counteract that by eating stress. Words mean things, I always say. For me, looking at them as stress foods is much more of a gut punch than saying inflammatory foods. Stress is not going to sneak in to my body disguised as a Girl Scout Thin Mint.
Well, maybe one. There’s bound to be a little stress in every life, right?
