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Hacking Holiday Stress-Eating

By Heather Davis, MS, RDN, LDN

The winter holiday season ushers in many familiar hurdles, especially for those who are traveling, navigating challenging family and social dynamics, or trying to stay on track with their health and nutrition goals while being inundated by holiday food marketing—which, let’s face it, may not always highlight the most balanced options available. Add to this the fact that the 2024 US presidential election process has heightened psychosocial stress for many individuals,1 and you have a perfect recipe for stress-eating heading into the end of the year. What can dietitians do to support the health of their clients and patients during this tumultuous time? Some answers to this question may seem obvious, but others may surprise you.

It's important to understand that stress tends to beget more stress. For example, when individuals are pushed to meet heightened psychosocial demands, such as a tight schedule with impending deadlines, other secondary stressors may appear on the scene with more frequency, such as erratic eating patterns. These erratic eating patterns may themselves be stressors, inviting nutrient imbalances or additional biochemical shifts—many of which are also stressors—in the form of compensatory metabolic changes impacting the physiology of mood, sleep, cognition, digestion, and more. As this stress snowball builds, it may be harder to get a good night’s sleep, itself an additional stressor to add to the mix and one that can further drive stress-eating behaviors. Chronic stress-induced dysregulations in neurotransmitter metabolism, such as changes in the dopaminergic system, among other pathways, can alter behavioral responses to different stimuli that are associated with reward anticipation.2 In some ways, this means it may also feel harder to get motivated to jump back on track once we’ve slipped.

Many who struggle with stress-eating may feel a rollercoaster of inexplicable cravings or urges related to food and eating behavior at the end of the figurative row of collapsing dominos, not fully understanding how they got there and how the snowball became so large and unwieldy.

While practicing mindfulness, including mindful eating techniques, has proven beneficial in these settings,3 it may not tell the complete story. It’s important to consider other powerful nutritional factors at play in both setting up the snowball effect of stress and in helping to slow or even reverse its progression.

Nutrition Support for Curbing Stress-Eating

Stress-eating, as briefly described above, may be one of the last behavioral dominos to fall in a long line of biochemical changes, setting the stage for hours, days, or even weeks leading up to the moment. What was going on in those earlier instances? Were there other nutrition-related stressors lurking in the background? Many people speaking about stress may forget that nutrition itself is one of the biggest modulators of the physiological stress response, for better or worse. Popular interventions or techniques for stress management focus largely on behavioral modification in a vacuum, and it can be all too easy to forget that nutritional factors inform the foundation for our physiology and behavioral repertoire in the first place.

Nutrient type and amount, timing of delivery, and other dietary-related components greatly impact how the body perceives and processes the stimuli of the world around us, including psychosocial stressors, through modulating all components of metabolism. The role of nutrition in influencing the biochemistry of behavior and cognition is reflected in the growing field of nutritional psychiatry.4

Correcting chronic nutrient imbalances, optimizing meal timing to align with circadian processes, assessing hydration, improving diet quality, addressing gut health, and other personalized components of nutrition therapy may greatly impact the stress response, including how stress is perceived and processed.5 Appropriate nutrition support may even improve stress resilience.6 Some may rightly argue that there’s a two-way relationship between stress resilience and healthful eating behaviors, where a decline in one often drives a decline in the other. Of course, this is true. However, as dietitians, there’s a great deal we can offer to improve this “chicken or the egg” scenario.

Practical Tips

Asking whether a client or patient was experiencing symptoms of hunger when they experienced an episode of what they’d consider stress-eating or emotionally driven eating can be a good place to start. If no symptoms of hunger were present, the advice and support RDs might provide could look a little different than if someone admits to feeling ravenous or experiencing other symptoms of hunger going in. In the former, mindful eating and general mindfulness techniques can be especially helpful to allow someone to slow down, reconnect with their body, and gain valuable perspective on internal states and motivations.7,8 From there, moving into a deeper exploration of the bigger nutritional and behavioral picture described below may be helpful. In the latter, helping someone understand how to make relatively healthier food choices at the moment the last domino falls, as well as understand how to set their body up for a more balanced rhythm of hunger and satiety cues from that bigger picture going forward, may be a good goal.

Making food choices in the moment that avoid fanning the fire of stress may include reaching for protein- and fiber-rich foods, healthy fats, and relatively lower glycemic carbohydrate options to help blunt tendencies for reactive hypoglycemia or high glycemic variability in those who may be prone to these responses, which could further activate the stress response system.9 

The Bigger Picture

Dietary approaches and nutrition factors that may contribute to stress response activation, dysregulation, and even drive stress-eating in some cases may include, but are not limited to, the following: 

  • nutritional deficiencies or imbalances, including underfueling or simply failing to meet caloric, macronutrient, or micronutrient needs; 
  • inappropriate types and durations of fasting for an individual’s needs, including going too long between meals or snacks; 
  • erratic meal timing and inconsistent eating schedules; 
  • eating in other ways that frequently encourage dramatic swings in blood glucose or chronic high glycemic variability10-12; 
  • choosing food types, amounts, or preparation methods not well matched to an individual’s digestive/absorptive capacity, including factors driving dysbiosis13; 
  • high intake of added sugar14; and 
  • alcohol use disorder or intakes of alcohol not well tolerated by an individual.15 

In addition, helping individuals build new manageable habits gradually over time, including having more balanced food options readily available with ease and affordability, is a fundamental piece of the puzzle and something all of us as dietitians are well trained to navigate.

Dietitians know that addressing each of these elements with patients and clients is no small task, often involving providing consistent support over time from an interprofessional team. Educating others about the interconnectedness of stress resilience, dietary and food-related behaviors, mood and cognition, and health outcomes is something RDs may uniquely excel at. Dietitians’ training and deep understanding of applied nutrition science can help open doors for those they work with to better grasp these relationships and chart a healthier way forward, including navigating the tricky stress of the holiday season with a light at the end of the tunnel.

— Heather Davis, MS, RDN, LDN, is editor of Today’s Dietitian.

References 

  • Stress in America 2024: a nation in political turmoil. American Psychological Association website. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2024. Published October 2024. Accessed November 11, 2024. 
  • Baik JH. Stress and the dopaminergic reward system. Exp Mol Med. 2020;52(12):1879-1890. 
  • Torske A, Bremer B, Holzel BK, Maczka A, Koch K. Mindfulness meditation modulates stress-eating and its neural correlates. Sci Rep. 2024;14(1):7294 
  • Adan RAH, van der Beek EM, Buitelaar JK, et al. Nutritional psychiatry: towards improving mental health by what you eat. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2019;29(12):1321-1332. 
  • Muscaritoli M. The impact of nutrients on mental health and well-being: insights from the literature. Front Nutr. 2021;8:656290. 
  • Leipold B, Klier K, Dapperger E, Schmidt A. Physical activity and nutrition in relation to resilience: a cross-sectional study. Sci Rep. 2024;14(1):2272. 
  • Giannopoulou I, Kotopoulea-Nikolaidi M, Daskou S, Martyn K, Patel A. Mindfulness in eating is inversely related to binge eating and mood disturbances in university students in health-related disciplines. Nutrients. 2020;12(2):396. 
  • Godfrey KM, Gallo LC, Afari N. Mindfulness-based interventions for binge eating: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Behav Med. 2015;38(2):348-362. 
  • Altuntaş Y. Postprandial reactive hypoglycemia. Sisli Etfal Hastan Tip Bul. 2019;53(3):215-220. 
  • Mishra S, Singh AK, Rajotiya S, et al. Exploring the risk of glycemic variability in non-diabetic depressive individuals: a cross-sectional GlyDep pilot study. Front Psychiatry. 2023;14:1196866. 
  • Klimontov VV, Saik OV, Korbut AI. Glucose variability: how does it work? Int J Mol Sci. 2021;22(15):7783. 
  • McCrory C, McLoughlin S, Layte R, et al. Towards a consensus definition of allostatic load: a multi-cohort, multi-system, multi-biomarker individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2023;153:106117. 
  • Chbeir S, Carrión V. Resilience by design: how nature, nurture, environment, and microbiome mitigate stress and allostatic load. World J Psychiatry. 2023;13(5):144-159. 
  • Jacques A, Chaaya N, Beecher K, Ali SA, Belmer A, Bartlett S. The impact of sugar consumption on stress driven, emotional and addictive behaviors. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2019;103:178-199. 
  • Marty VN, Mulpuri Y, Munier JJ, Spigelman I. Chronic alcohol disrupts hypothalamic responses to stress by modifying CRF and NMDA receptor function. Neuropharmacology. 2020;167:107991.