Are you stress eating? Know all about it here

When we are in stress, we tend to get food cravings. It is a normal trait of human beings to use food to help them through stressful situations. However, this also has a nutritional explanation to why we tend to eat more and crave more salty and sweet food items when we are dealing with a stressful situation or are having a difficult day at work. We often see people munching on a bag of chips or eating a bar of chocolate at a stressful day at work – this is when stress eating kicks in. But why do we crave food when we are in stress? Nutritionist Anjali Mukerjee explained stress eating with an informative post on her Instagram profile a day back.

Stress and cravings go hand in hand, said Anjali. “If you’re stressed, you will have a lot of food cravings. You will either have a salt craving or a sugar craving. Because stress and cravings, food cravings go together,” read an excerpt of her post. She further explained that when we go through stress, we tend to lose a lot of magnesium from the body. Hence the food cravings start as the body’s way of letting us know of the mineral deficiencies.

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Anjali suggested that in stressful situation, we should consume more green and leafy vegetables to give back to the body all the minerals that we have lost in the process. She also added that if if the body is facing deficiency of minerals, the vitamins we consumed also do not get absorbed.

Anjali further explained why we crave salty and sweet food items during stress. “Usually, a salt craving is due to a lack of minerals in the body and a sugar craving is due to eating too much refined flour which is maida and too much sugar,” the nutritionist wrote. Eating a high amount of maida and sugar causes insulin resistance in the body, which further leads to more sugar cravings.

However, we need to keep a check on consumption of processed food items during stress eating. Anjali added that eating too much of processed foods causes mineral deficiency, which further leads to hair loss. If hair loss gets more serious, it is due to the deficiency of protein in the body.