Are you stress eating? Know all about it here

When we are stressed, we tend to eat cravings. It is a normal trait of human beings to use food to help them in stressful situations. However, this also has a nutritional explanation for why we tend to eat more and crave more salty and sweet foods when faced with a stressful situation or having a tough day at work. We often see people chewing on a bag of chips or eating a candy bar on a stressful day at work; this is when stress kicks in. But why do we have food cravings when we are stressed? Nutritionist Anjali Mukerjee explained stress eating with an informative post on his Instagram profile a day ago.

Stress and cravings go hand in hand, Anjali said. “If you’re stressed, you’ll have a lot of food cravings. You will have a craving for salt or a craving for sugar. Because stress and cravings, food cravings go together”, reads an excerpt from his publication. He further explained that when we go through stress, we tend to lose a lot of magnesium from the body. Hence, food cravings begin as the body’s way of alerting us to mineral deficiencies.

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Anjali suggested that in a stressful situation, we should consume more green and leafy vegetables to return to the body all the minerals that we have lost in the process. She also added that if the body faces a mineral deficiency, the vitamins we consume are also not absorbed.

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

However, we must control the consumption of processed foods during stress meals. Anjali added that eating too many processed foods causes mineral deficiency, which further leads to hair loss. If hair loss becomes more severe, it is due to protein deficiency in the body.