How Stress Levels Can Be Affected By Your Diet

If you are to face a stressful situation - an important meeting, a heart-to-heart talk with someone you don't like, but you have to meet - you may feel like you need something special to calm your nerves. Most people in such situation grab a piece of chocolate or a cookie. Don't worry if you are among them, using food to lower one's stress level is a common and effective method of coping with stress. Provided of course that you won't overdo it.

The problem is that while eating a candy can help you cope with a short-term stress, if you live under pressure for a long time, you may find out that your are instinctively seeking snack foods every time you feel stressed. Soon after you find out that suddenly you start facing even more problems because you eat goodies to reduce the stress. Your health suffers, you start gaining weight and suddenly what initially was a cure becomes worse than the initial trouble.

There are a lot of risky professions when it comes to stress overeating. One of them is a truck driver. While we do not usually think of it as of a stressful job, being constantly on the go, sleeping away from home and having to deal with traffic jams makes this job particularly prone to overeating problems. Drivers try to reduce their stress and calm their nerves by eating tons of snacks. As the result, they quickly get on weight and have to start another ways to lessen the stress - and to lose the weigh.

Food gives you a feeling of comfort and lets you for a moment think that everything is going to be all right. If you use that attitude to solve problems, that's ok. However, there are many people who have unconsciously started to rely on food as the only way of coping with stress. For example, there are thousands of mothers around the world who start eating snacks the moment any problems with children starts instead of trying to fix them. Then, they initially feel better, but the problems persist. When they show up next time, mothers eat something sweet again and again and again... As the result they can get on forty-fifty pounds during a single year.

The point is that we can't overcome stress using snacks. It may let us go for an hour or maybe even a day, but it will certainly come back - stronger and harder to cope with. If you want to lower the stress level, you have to face the stressful situation and find out what really causes the feeling of stress, then eliminate it. You can always do it, regardless of your present situation. It may be hard at times and a quick victory is rarely possible, but you can start improve your life and reduce the stress level to more manageable level.

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