Two Fattening Nightmares: Stress & Emotional Eating Make You Over Eat And Store Food As Fat. How To Wake Up From The Nightmare

Stress can cause you to overeat, from a few hundred to a few thousand extra calories per meal. In nearly all cases where stress is involved with weight gain, emotional eating plays a profound role. Stress affects our ability to maintain stable blood sugar – it can spike it high and drop it low. Stress also plays a profound role in influencing the levels of our favorite neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin. The lesson on how stress affects your appetite is simple: Stress will cause you to over eat and store most of those calories as fat.

Crisis, Then Cravings
We’ve all had deadlines at work. You know; those projects where you come to work two hours early and stay four hours late. You put your personal life on hold. Sometimes, you put your hygiene on hold (hey, it happens). Nerves are touchy. People are cranky. And there’s no sigh of relief until it’s all over. But that won’t be for at least another 120 hours.
Even when under this kind of pressure, most people are able to obtain some sort of equilibrium – less sleep, fewer breaks, but you rationalize to yourself that nevertheless, if you maintain this pace, you’ll be able to make it to the finish line with your sanity.
And then you get the call; or the e-mail; or the word from your coworker who rushes into your office with that look on his face that only means one thing – this job is now going to suck and the only thing that is going to suck more than this job will be my life until this miserable form of purgatory is over.
This is where those reserves in your stamina that you’ve hidden away for a rainy day come into play. You feel the sweat on your forehead and collar; you really wish business casual included shorts on days like this. You’re now rushing from the printer to your coworker. Your pulse is racing; there’s a knot below your chest. You’re speed walking to your boss’s office for approval on the next section. Your heart is racing and your pupils are half their normal size. While on the phone, you tap your fingers for every 2 seconds that you’re on hold. How much longer will this crisis leer over my head? Everything takes too much time, and there isn’t enough time for anything.
Never mind the fact that this news has come to you as you’re taking down the last part of a well deserved Subway Sandwich (low fat on whole wheat of course). And so, with a full belly and a fuller docket, you run to the phone booth, put on your cape, and leap up, up, and away to save your coworkers from the evil UPS man who’s threatening to leave at 4pm with or without your package on his truck…
It’s now 90 minutes since this crisis started and you’re already wearing thin. You have to keep moving but for some odd reason, that sandwich that normally keeps you full until at least 4:30 is not doing its job of protecting you from the temptation of the birthday cake that’s left over in the fridge from last week’s party. You’re not so much hungry as you are craving the taste of sugar in your mouth. You’re actually salivating, and although your stomach is full, it’s murmuring for some action. You can’t get the thought of that cake out of your head…
Another 30 minutes goes by and you’re feeling fatigued. You’re tired and cranky, you still have another 2 hours of mind numbing details to go over before you can take a break, and you’ve had it with your drama queen coworker who freaks out on the outside instead of bottling it all up, and keeping her nervous break-downs to herself, like the rest of us…
Not even within 5 minutes of this pivotal moment, you’ve already cut yourself a slice of the cake that’s one and a half times larger than normal and you’re pouring a coke into a plastic cup to go along with it. Off you go back to your desk to tackle the situation with new found stamina and exuberance.
If this was the first time this year you’ve done this, you wouldn’t be so concerned about your ever increasing waistline. And if this was the first time this month you’ve done this, you wouldn’t be so concerned that your waistline was going to expand ever so faster. But you’ve recently noticed you average about 3 or 4 crises a month, which totals to 5 or 6 sugar binges a month.
Believe me, if these were the only times you ate poorly out of an entire month, your growing waistline wouldn’t be a problem. However, we are creatures of habit, and the person who runs to the candy machine every time they encounter stress is not the kind of person who calmly moderates their junk food intake during all the other opportunities in a given month in a typical American life. It just doesn’t work that way.

Freaking Out When Full Can Make You Fatter
Why did this happen? You ate a full meal and then immediately encountered a stressful situation. When that happens, low blood sugar is inevitable within 90 minutes for anyone susceptible to low blood sugar swings.
As soon as you eat, insulin rises to store that food into your liver, muscle, and fat cells. It’s the liver to which we want to pay special attention; cortisone will demand its glycogen stores (stored carbohydrate) first as soon as a stress is encountered.
But what happens when you just ate and encountered a stress? Your liver gets confused as it processes glycogen from insulin while simultaneously releasing its already stored glycogen to cortisone. It’s not as simple as depositing $1,000 in cash in the bank and then letting your friend cash a check from you for the same amount; your liver wants to either store glycogen or release it at any given time, not both. The result is less glycogen stored from insulin, and less glycogen released to cortisone. In a few hours time (as little as 90 minutes), this can result in low blood sugar, leaving you hungry to eat again. But these will be calories that you did not completely burn. Your metabolic rate will be running higher in the face of the stress, but your low blood sugar will give you the tendency to want to keep eating beyond the calories you’ve burned.
This is a very likely time where you’ll want to binge on something sugary. You’re liable to feel tired, distracted, and mentally fogged. You’ll be moving slower and even the simplest tasks will feel like a burden. Dopamine and serotonin will be low - you’ll need a reward – something that makes up for all the overexertion you’ve just put yourself through. Indeed, this feeling that you deserve it will be the very argument you make to yourself to justify your actions.
What’s interesting is that your blood sugar may feel low but may not be that low. Blood sugar in this situation will likely be in the low end of normal (80-90 mg/dl). It’s very well documented that people sensitive to blood sugar swings who were fed large doses of caffeine (a.k.a. stress in a plastic cup) complained of low blood sugar symptoms when their actual blood sugar tested within the normal to low-normal range. No one was going to pass out in a diabetic coma from the coffee, but they still experienced the familiar shakes, sugar cravings, crankiness, hunger, sweating, and rapid heart beat associated with low blood sugar.
The reason caffeine and low blood sugar can make you feel this way is due to adrenalin. You experience the above symptoms when you’re hypoglycemic because of a surge in adrenalin, but adrenalin is also released whenever you consume caffeine. Same hormone in both situations, same feelings.
The focus here should not be on the coffee but the effects of stress, here in the form of caffeine, on those prone to low blood sugar. Your body, when facing a crisis at work, will elicit the same stress response and excrete relatively the same amount of adrenalin that you would when under the effects of a strong cup of java.

Solutions to low blood sugar from stressn- Don’t stress out in the first placen- Don’t take caffeine or other stimulants at this time.
- Take 2,000 mg of powdered L-Glutamine immediately to kill sugar cravings. Then, on an empty stomach, try taking 100 mg of 5-HTP, 100 mg of L-Theonine, and 1,500 mg of L-Tyrosine, found in any store that sells supplements. This amino acid cocktail will calm you down, focus your mind, and halt your carbohydrate cravings.
- If your blood sugar really is low, then you need to EAT. Have a 200 calorie snack on hand that is high in protein, fiber, and low Glycemic carbs.