Why Stress Affects Your Eating More Than You Think
Stress plays a far greater role in your eating habits than most people realise. While for many the focus is on willpower, calories, or food choices, what’s often missing from the conversation is the stress hormone cortisol, and how it can quietly disrupt your appetite, metabolism, digestion, and blood sugar regulation.
How Cortisol Affects Your Body and Eating Habits
Cortisol is released in response to perceived danger, triggering the classic 'fight or flight' response. It increases heart rate, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels, essentially preparing your body to act quickly. In short bursts, this response is adaptive and helpful. But in our modern lives, many of us experience ongoing, low-grade stress -emails, deadlines, family pressures, body image worries- and that means cortisol is elevated far more often than it should be.
When cortisol is consistently high, it can cause:
Blood sugar instability and insulin resistance
Energy crashes and persistent fatigue
Increased anxiety and irritability
Heightened sugar cravings and emotional eating urges
Over time, these effects can make it harder to regulate your appetite and can lead to a pattern of reactive eating, especially in the afternoons or evenings when stress often accumulates.
Stress, Insulin, and Blood Sugar: What’s the Link?
One of cortisol’s lesser-known effects is how it interferes with insulin sensitivity. Insulin is the hormone that helps your cells absorb glucose from the bloodstream. When stress is chronic, your body becomes less responsive to insulin, making it harder to keep blood sugar stable. This can lead to sharp spikes and crashes, both of which are often followed by cravings for quick sources of energy like refined carbs or sugary foods.
In my work with clients, we spend time rebalancing blood sugar through gentle, consistent nutrition, not restriction. By learning to eat in a way that supports steady energy and a calmer nervous system, clients often notice improved sleep, reduced cravings, and a more balanced mood.
Your Thoughts Can Trigger the Stress Response
It’s not just external stressors that activate cortisol. Internal thoughts and beliefs including self-criticism, food guilt, or body dissatisfaction can have the same physiological impact.
For example, if you eat a biscuit and immediately think, “I’ve ruined everything,” your body may interpret that thought as a threat. Your adrenal glands release cortisol, your liver pumps out more glucose, and your body responds as if you’re under attack. The glucose that isn’t used for actual physical action often ends up stored in fat cells.
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of emotional and binge eating recovery: the way your thoughts about food can become part of the stress cycle. Coaching clients to shift their inner dialogue, releasing guilt and shame, and instead approaching food with curiosity and compassion, is a key part of my method.
The Power of Perception: A Surprising Study
One fascinating study demonstrated just how much your mindset can shape your body’s responses. Two groups drank identical beverages, each containing the same amount of sugar. However, one group was told the drink was sugary, while the other believed it was sugar-free. The group who expected sugar had a higher blood glucose response than those who didn’t, even though the drinks were identical. This highlights how powerful your thoughts and expectations can be in shaping your physiology.
Why Traditional Dieting Misses the Point
Despite all this, the diet industry continues to push willpower, calorie counting, and rigid control and now increasingly the use of GLP-1 weight loss medications, which suppress appetite. But whether it’s through restriction or appetite suppression, these approaches often overlook the deeper, root causes of eating behaviours including stress and mindset. In my clinical work, I’ve seen that meaningful, lasting change comes not from silencing hunger, but from understanding why we eat.
Instead of micromanaging calories, we look at the where, why, and how within a framework of coaching, compassionate cognitive work, and evidence-based nutrition. This approach supports not just physical health, but mental wellbeing too.
This topic is something I explore in depth in my best-selling book, The Binge Freedom Method™, which guides you through overcoming binge and emotional eating in a sustainable way. If you’re tired of quick fixes and want to get to the root of your eating habits, this book was written for you.
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