The Relation Between Food And Stress
by Andrew John
Have you ever eaten a piece of chocolate to reduce your stress before important meeting? Or do you believe that if you eat a cookie, everything will look brighter? If not, you are an exception. Most people when facing some stressful situation use food to lessen their stress.
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.
Surprisingly enough, the most dangerous job when it comes to coping with stress by overeating is a truck driver. Long hours, being constantly in the move and having to meet tight deadlines make them eat more and more snack foods to calm down. Soon after that, many of them become overweight - all because of an attempt to reduce the stress level.
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.
So, what can we do if the stress can't be fought using candies? How can we protect ourselves from stress? Then answer is simple: we can't protect ourselves from stress, but we can fight it. Find the real source of some particular problem and solve it. This will make you feel a bit better. Then find another one, solve it and feel even happier. And so on, and so on, and so on until you become as relaxed as on a sunny beach.
The Author: John Andrews currently writes about important health related issues that really matter and are of great concern today. For more information on Stress Management and Natural Stress Relief , just click on the links. You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
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