Stay healthy under pressure

This past weekend my household was hit with some pretty heavy life hurdles. On Saturday morning at 6am I was taking care of my very sick dog, who is dealing with a potentially terminal birth defect. Saturday afternoon brought with it news of some pretty serious family troubles. Couple these with work stresses that keep building into 2012, and we had ourselves a recipe for nutritional disaster. We started with cheetos (at least they were baked, not fried), continued with frozen pizza, and wrapped it all up with pelmeni, which is a great meal for the taste buds, but not so much for the stomach. It became clear to me on Sunday that I needed to hit the grocery store and pick up some fresh fruits and vegetables. I also grabbed some fiber rich cereal, an assortment of tasty yogurts, and two gallons of orange juice (for good measure).

It’s no real secret that “we seek chocolate, ice cream or napoleans, scientists have discovered, not just because they taste good. It’s actually the body’s attempt to put a brake on the runaway machinery of chronic stress.” [source] When you’re stressed, according to Psychology Today, your brain “signals your body to turn out a hormone called cortisol. It in turn relays the message throughout the body to mobilize you for a life-saving response. Your heart races. You become highly attentive and alert, even vigilant. Blood vessels constrict and divert the flow of blood from leisurely processes such as digestion to fast-acting muscles. Metabolism shifts too, and energy is made rapidly available to your muscles, readying them for action.” What’s great about this fight or flight system that our bodies have developed over years of cultivated reactions in the face of danger is that we naturally have this ability to turn off the cortisol fire-hose. But this natural ability, doesn’t apply to chronic stress. When we’re faced with situations that rise our stress levels on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis, our bodies start to create more and more cortisol, sending us into code red.

Code red?! How are we supposed to deal with that? Researchers at the University of California San Francisco suggest that we self medicate with comfort foods. In fact, after testing two groups of women in either a high stress situation or not, “the researchers found that women who were the most stressed out were the most likely to report that they eat more in response to emotional upsets.” Researchers then measured the amount of abdominal fat in the two test groups. The stressed out women had more fat than the zen group. Moreover, eating comfort foods as a response to chronic stress actually seems to make us more stressed by being “a double-edged sword — leading to a dampened-down stress response system.” – UCSF psychologist Elissa Epel, PhD

Ok, so I’ve figured out why we had such a bad diet this weekend at the Simpson house; now I want to know how to avoid this in the future. I did make myself feel better by going to the grocery store and stocking up on healthy foods, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have access to junk food, or the will power to abstain. So, after sifting through a bunch of articles on the affects of stress on my diet and having a personal “come-to-Jesus” about my waist line, I found this study also done by UCSF about meditation and practicing mindful eating. After taking a nine week mindfulness training course, women in the UCSF study were asked to “set aside 30 minutes daily for meditation exercises and to practice mindful eating during meals.” What they found was that “chronic stress, cortisol secretion and abdominal fat were clearly linked. Those who had greater improvements in listening to their bodies’ cues, or greater reductions in stress or cortisol, experienced the greatest reductions in abdominal fat.”

My trip to the grocery store means that my intentions were probably in the right place, I’m on the path to mindful eating. Now, it’s a matter of practice, so me and my Mix’t Greens salad are going to go do some meditating. Enjoy your lunches and good luck reducing stress this week!