Stress and Your Diet – Don’t Combine Them

We often hear about how comfort food will help to brighten our day, to provide a haven for us when we get really stressed, but we often fail to realize that these distractions can also represent a facet of our uncontrolled sugar addiction. Comfort foods make us forget about all those trials and tribulations, are typically easy to prepare and are easily accessible. They can often contain a significant amount of refined sugar and have questionable, if any holistic nutrition value.

Stress is an everyday occurence in all our lives. Some of us are able to deal with it better than others. The recent severe economic downturn around the globe has piled on additional levels of stress and has challenged us more than ever before in many cases. Many people choose to turn to external influences and “fixes” to deal with their stress levels, often turning to cigarettes or alcohol or maintaining a less than optimum dietary level.

Stress and diet can be inexorably linked and if we are not able to control our stress, we can certainly add to it by eating very poorly. Sugar addiction is prevalent in modern society as its inherent ability to enhance flavors and add marketability to some otherwise bland food and drinks has endeared it to the manufacturers.

What is often termed comfort food could just as easily be called stress food, as when we turn to these particular products we are trying to modify a certain situation that we are going through. However, what many of us do not realize is that when we add sugar-based products and super refined sugars to our intake in these situations we can significantly aggravate the original problem. When we are stressed, our natural digestive processes may not function as well and the interaction of the sugar with our existing body chemicals can cause our stressful situation to become apparently worse. What we set out to try and temper, can be aggravated in this way.

Holistic health solutions recognize that sugar addiction is a primary contributor to the very stress that we are feeling in the first place. Our over reliance on sugar has undoubtedly accumulated over time and is contributing to a chemical imbalance within. This makes it more difficult to deal with everyday stresses and strains and the vicious circle can be completed when we turn to comfort foods to try and remedy our symptoms.

It is important to understand that a certain amount of stress is a vital ingredient and makes the human body function well. It can generally create good brain function and a level of awareness allowing us to deal with our complex lives. However, when stress becomes overbearing it can be very difficult to deal with, can lead to irrational decisions, the potential for long-term health problems and a significant sugar addiction, all of which must be contained.