Healthy Eating, Stress, and Self Control

by Nina

Line of Moss by Brad Gibson

One of the most important things you can do to support healthy eating is to practice stress management. Though the reasons for this weren’t immediately obvious to me, the more I’ve looked into this topic, the more compelling those reasons become. Recently I wrote a post Yoga, Stress and Weight Management about how chronic stress causes weight gain by stimulating your appetite. As if increased hunger isn’t bad enough, it turns out that being stressed out can pose an even bigger challenge to your commitment to eating right: it weakens your willpower and causes you to be more impulsive. Say you had a long, traffic-jam filled commute on the way to the office, there’s a critical meeting with a client that you make with a minute to spare, and someone’s left a big, pink box of fresh donuts glistening there on the table. Then, even though you planned a day of healthy eating, with a homemade lunch and a healthy snack, before you have time to stop yourself, you somehow you find yourself with a half-eaten donut in your hand.... Does this sound familiar to anyone? According to The Willpower Instinct by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, you’re more likely to cave in to temptation when you’re experiencing the stress response than you are when you are in a state of relaxation.

“While your body was getting ready to defend your life, the alarm system in your brain was busy trying to make sure you didn’t get in the body’s way. It focused your attention on the saber-toothed tiger and your surroundings, making sure no stray thoughts distracted you from the threat at hand. That’s right, the fight-or-flight response wants to make you more impulsive.”

As is often the case, a response that makes sense when your life is actually in danger (a time when over-thinking is probably not a good idea) can backfire on you in modern times. The traffic jams and the meeting with the client that were stressing you out weren’t exactly life threatening, so not being “distracted” by your plans for healthy eating won’t improve the situation (and might even make you feel worse after you come down from your sugar high).

Fortunately, yoga has a few solutions to offer–both for the short term and the long term—to help you reduce the impulsive behavior that can accompany chronic stress. For the short term, Dr. McGonigal recommends slowing down your breathing to four to six breaths per minute, which she says helps shift your body from a state of stress to “self-control mode.” This is obviously something you could do discretely at your desk or even in that conference room where the donuts lay glistening at you. (Your meeting might even go better if you stopped for a minute to “center” yourself this way before it begins.) And since lengthening your exhalation is also a good way to turn down the stress response, I’d add that you could practice any form of pranayama that emphasizes the exhalation over the inhalation.

For the longer term, Dr. McGonigal recommends that you spend some time practicing conscious relaxation to “restore your willpower reserve.” She suggests lying down and breathing deeply, which sounds like Savasana (Relaxation pose) to me! Besides this, of course, yoga has a huge repertoire of ways you can de-stress, including meditation, yoga nidra, restorative yoga, supported inverted poses, and active asana poses practiced with mindfulness (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga for further information).

So if you’re having trouble sticking to your healthy eating plans for the new year, why not experiment by trying one or more of these relaxation techniques and see if they strengthen your willpower. I’d love to hear back about any results. (Besides, if worse comes to worst, you’ll at least be less stressed out!)

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