How Toxic Stress Can Make You Crave Fast Food
Do you crave sugary foods or carbs? Today we are diving into sugar, carbs, and trauma! Yep, trauma. Remember, another phrase we use to talk about trauma is toxic stress.
If you have frequent cravings for carbs or sugars, chances are these are trauma symptoms manifesting in your life. 🤯 Those of us with toxic stress are typically anxious and by the end of the day have decision fatigue (we are tired of making decisions by meal time). Cravings, toxic stress and real life (let’s be honest) oftentimes lead us to a drive-through line. Or at the very least poor food choices.
Join Dr. Jeana Hoyt and me to discover why we crave these foods if we have experienced toxic stress and how to avoid caving into them!
The Vicious Cycle of Fast Food
It’s no fault of our own, but the vicious cycle of food cravings is very difficult to break. When I think about fast food, I like to think about what's going on in our lives behind the scenes that are driving us to need fast food (pun intended 😉). Perhaps there are a lot of different reasons that we might feel drawn to eat fast food, and usually, most of those reasons are due to stress.
We might be really exhausted, or we're in a rush. Maybe we're feeling depressed, or we feel like we need an emotional break. And even though fast food is a way of treating ourselves every once in a while (I am thinking of my favorite In-N-Out Burger order), over time it can be very detrimental to our mental and physical health.
I usually pick fast food because I'm so hungry and I can't wait, or I don't have the brain power to figure out a better option. It is definitely when I am not in my wise mind or prefrontal cortex.
All of these stressful situations that lead to poor choices increase our cortisol levels a little bit. Cortisol is a hormone that comes from these little teeny, tiny glands that sit on the top of our kidneys, and they produce our adrenaline and noradrenaline. They pump this stuff out, this cortisol, that helps us be driven to seek out higher calorie, higher sugars, higher fat foods. It’s our body's way of saying you need something, and it kicks into this little bit of a fight or flight mode and causes us to start looking immediately for food.
How to Fight The Urge for Un-nutritional Foods
There are a lot of alternatives that we can choose that won’t cost us in the long run other than fast food. The irony about fast food or these highly processed foods that are highly refined is that they seem like they're going to be helpful at the moment. But over time, they actually cause the exact same symptoms that we're trying to kind of get ourselves out of: increased feelings of tiredness, irritability, anxiousness, and lacking focus.
In those moments, when we're activated, our cortisol is going, “we're hungry, we're under stress!” One thing I like to do is have snacks in the car, like nuts or sunflower seeds, that I can eat in the car.
On the drive home from work, I like to eat one item I have saved from my lunch, like a baggie of vegetables that are already pre-cut or an apple. It helps me feel better when I know that I'm eating a healthy snack on the way home. And it gets me away from the fast food lines that I'm driving past. It also holds me over during dinner prep for my family.
Another tip is just to have some five-minute dinners on hand, prepped ahead of time, that you can just throw together in literally five minutes. That's the same amount of time it takes to drive through a drive-thru, even less in some cases. So this would be like bean dip with tortilla chips with a little bit of salad on the side or rice. Any kind of sandwich, like turkey with avocado, would be great brain food for you. You are not going to eat like that every night, just when you're in that crisis mode.
So the goal is really just crisis management and having a few tools on hand to prevent those emergencies. It's really a win-win.
If you feel like toxic stress or trauma is adding to your everyday stress, then I highly recommend taking our Do I have trauma or toxic stress quiz! After you complete the quiz, you will be taken to a huge library of resources that will help you understand and gain control over toxic stress!
