Why some people eat more under stress while others eat less.
What the evidence says
- In controlled lab conditions, high cortisol reactors consumed more calories on stress days but ate similar amounts on control days — the stress-eating difference is driven by cortisol reactivity pattern, not baseline appetite; high reactors also preferentially chose sweet foods[1]
- The review proposes that ”the obesity epidemic may be exacerbated by the preponderance of chronic stress, unsuccessful attempts at food restriction, and their independent and possibly synergistic effects on increasing the reward value of highly palatable food”[2]
- The review ”specifies five classes of emotion-induced changes of eating”, not one: emotional control of food choice, emotional suppression of food intake, impairment of cognitive eating controls, eating to regulate emotions, and emotion-congruent modulation of eating. ”These classes are distinguished by antecedent conditions, eating responses and mediating mechanisms”[3]
- One of the five classes is ”emotional suppression of food intake”, so emotions can reduce eating as well as increase it[3]