Stress, Stress, Stress and Your Waistline
Have you noticed that when you get stressed, all of a sudden your appetite changes? You get way hungrier, or you just don’t feel like eating. Maybe you’ve even noticed that your food preferences change? On this week’s episode, we explore how stress affects our appetite, our food choices, and our waistlines. Our guest is Dr. John Denninger from the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine and Dr. Marc Potenza at Yale School of Medicine.
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Guests
Dr. John Denninger is the Director of Research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. His research focuses on the mind-body connection in medicine.
Dr. Marc Potenza is a Professor of Physiatry at Yale School of Medicine who studies addictive behaviors and impulse control. He provides his insight on hyper-palatable foods.
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Juna: You know, people listening to this, Eddie, we make it sound effortless because that's our job,
but--
Eddie: Of course, we're professionals.
Juna: We're professionals. But what people may not know, is that the entire day on the days when
we record, I am scrambling, running around, super stressed about what we're going to say today,
making sure it sounds good. And I'm just literally eating the entire day, snacking like running to the
kitchen to put off doing things that I can do for this because I'm scared. And I thought this whole
podcast is supposed to help with food, not make it worse and make me eat more.
Eddie: Oh gosh, Juna, you sound so stressed out. Let's just take a deep breath.
Juna: Ok.
Eddie You ready? In through your nose, out. OK. How do you feel now?
[Breathe together]
Juna: A little better. I can feel my heart pounding.
Eddie: So who did you talk to this week?
Juna: This week I actually had a meeting with John Denninger and it started off in a different kind
of way than my other meetings usually start.
John Denninger: Oh, just, do you have, you don't have any, do you dislike the smell of wood fires?
Juna: No, I love the smell of wood fires.
Oh do you? Oh, smell my tea then. Have you ever heard of lapsang souchong?
Juna: No. What is that?
John Denninger: It's a tea, a very old tea. I mean, it's been around for a long time.
Juna: So all this smell of wood fires and tea and whatever is pretty befitting because John
Denninger is a pretty chill guy.
John Denninger: I am the director of research here at the Benson Henry Institute for Mind-Body
Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Juna: Basically, he studies the Mind-Body connection.
John Denninger: You know, as a psychiatrist, I really see the brain as part of the rest of the body
and the mind as part of the brain. And our distinction between those two parts, the mind in the
body, is really an artificial one. Mind-body connection is really just a way of thinking about how
intimately the two are connected.
Eddie: So, Juna, when I'm talking to people about approaching a health goal, they really approach
it mostly through their body. They talk about the movement, "should I exercise?" But in this
episode of Food, We Need To Talk. I think it's time for us to talk about how your body interfaces
with your mind. If your primary concern is actually your physical health, your weight, your diet,
you can't address it without first digging into the mental aspects. I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Juna: And I'm Juna Gjata, and today we're talking about one thing that unites us all. No matter
what race, no matter what religion, no matter what gender, no matter what political party, if you
can believe it. One thing that we all have in common is stress.
Eddie: And the kinds of stress that we experienced today are a lot different than back in our
ancient history. John Denninger says think about our early ancestors over the course of human
evolution.
John Denninger: If you're a primitive person and you're walking along the savannas of Africa, and
all of a sudden you notice a lion a little ways off, not close enough to kill you right this moment,
but close enough to potentially decide they want to chase you.
Juna: You might notice a few things.
John Denninger: You might find your heart pounding. You might start to sweat. Your muscles
might get tense. Your focus might narrow on the lion itself.
Juna: And there's our good friend again, the stress response.
Eddie: And instead of lions chasing us, we have other predators. For example,
John Denninger: If you're sitting at your desk, and you get a nasty email from your boss,
Juna: Hopefully your boss is not eating you.
Eddie: But you have that fight or flight, that adrenaline rush. You perceive the threat, your body
gets ready to respond to escape the threat. But the acute response is not the problem.
John Denninger: The thing I worry about is that now more and more of us are being exposed to
chronic daily stresses, threats that are perceived that aren't really threats. Things like work
needing to be done, not getting enough sleep and, and the like.
Juna: So I don't mean to be a party pooper because I'm usually a positive person, but I'm just going
to say it, it's not really news that stress is bad for you.
Eddie: All right. The news is not that stress is affecting our eating. We've all come home at night.
You're tired, you're stressed, you've gotten that awful email.
Juna: In fact, did you not even tell me yesterday, what did you eat yesterday night?
Eddie: Well, I didn't, I missed my lunch, so I thought that I could make up the calories with some
chocolate cake. OK. And then and then I was preparing for the podcast.
Juna: Hosting nutrition podcast. Yes, OK.
Eddie: Reading an article about the dangers of food and stress. And that's when I went for the new
coconut chocolate ice cream.
Juna: And then.
Eddie: The fudgesicle.
Juna: While reading a paper about stress and food.
Eddie: And I was pointing at the screen with the fudgesicle stick, and I said, "they're right".
Actually, stress changes the types of food that you crave. There's your news.
John Denninger: People shift toward wanting to take on more carbohydrates. That's why when
people are stressed eating, typically it tends to be cookies and cakes and that kind of stuff, as
opposed to not a lot of stress eating of, say, celery and salad.
Juna: It kind of makes sense because if we look at what hyper-palatable foods give us in the short
term, then of course we reach for them, like when we're stressed out, right? Because we need
that temporary relief.
Marc Potenza: What you referred to as hyper-palatable foods are often rich in fat or sugar.
Juna: This is Dr. Marc Potenza, and he studies addictive behaviors. Hello, hello. And stress at Yale
School of Medicine.
Marc Potenza: These sweet and savory foods may have a short-term effect on relieving stress, but
may also be associated with longer term weight gain and obesity-related health risks.
Juna: So if you're coming home at night and like you grab a glass of wine or whatever to de-stress,
it's kind of the same idea. But unfortunately,
Marc Potenza: Engaging in addictive behaviors to cope with stress may be particularly relevant to
females as compared with males.
Eddie: Oh gosh, Juna.
Juna: What the heck.
Eddie: I really do not want to stress you out, but it turns out that the males are the ones that are
more often reaching for cigarettes and for alcohol.
Juna: What the heck?
Eddie: While the women are more likely to reach for the high fat, the high sugar comfort foods.
Juna: So annoying.
Eddie: And we'll take it one more step, Juna?
Juna: OK.
Eddie: So eating more comfort foods and even drinking more alcohol to cope with the stress,
that's probably not going to help your waistline. But also whether you're a man or woman, people
that have higher levels of cortisol, that's the chronic stress hormone tend to be even more
susceptible to stress eating.
Juna: No!
Eddie: And I'm going to talk in a second here. Elevated cortisol changes the way your body stores
the fat so that more of it goes to your belly.
Juna: So if I got rid of all my cortisol, would I finally stop stress eating?
Eddie: Well...
Juna: Classic, not a yes or no answer. Classic.
Eddie: You're talking to a doctor here. So we need cortisol in the right amount and at the
appropriate times. This is going to keep your system and other hormones well regulated. In fact, a
healthy person's cortisol level follows a pretty consistent pattern. It goes up in the morning. You
wake up, you're feeling good, like a morning cup of coffee, and then it starts to decrease
throughout the day. That's a healthy pattern. But if you get really stressed out, the cortisol spikes
and it disrupts this normal pattern. Imagine a fire alarm going off when you're trying to, like, get
ready for bed.
Juna: So now, if you're chronically stressed like a certain someone, basically it's like we're in
danger of being eaten all day. So the last thing your body would want to do is lose weight or gain
muscle. Like, that's not for dangerous times.
Eddie: So your body under chronic stress tends to keep putting on more fat. We want to reduce
stress and control the behaviors that stress might create. One of the most studied ways of trying
to get a hold of stress eating is actually mindfulness-based stress reduction. Here's how Dr.
Potenza explains it.
Marc Potenza: Mindfulness-based stress reduction incorporates aspects of eastern philosophies
into a western medical setting, and some of these involve changing attentional focus.
John Denninger: Have you ever done the raisin exercise?
Juna: What is Dr. Derringer talking about? Eddie, have you heard of the raisin exercise?
Eddie: Not only have I heard of the raisin exercise, but
[taps raisin box on table]
Juna: You came prepared today.
Eddie: Absolutely. I'm giving you a single raisin.
Juna: OK.
Eddie: You got it?
Juna: I've got my single raisin.
Eddie: All right, I want you to regard the raisin.
Juna: OK.
Eddie: Have you ever looked that carefully at the raisin?
Juna: No, I guess I haven't.
Eddie: It kind of gnarly, huh?
Juna: Yeah, it's all like wrinkly.
Eddie: Yeah, I mean, like how many wrinkles on it? It's like more wrinkles than you can imagine.
Maybe smell it now. Does it smell like anything?
Juna: It smells like my snack boxes when I was little.
Eddie: Except there's only one of them. And now nice and easily, just put it in your mouth. Put it
on your tongue.
[Juna chews]
Eddie: No, no chewing yet.
Juna: Oh, OK.
Eddie: Just sort of experience it. Kind of rolling around, you feel the edges with your tongue up
against your palate and all that. A little sweet, maybe. Are you experiencing the raisin yet?
Juna: A little bit.
Eddie: OK, now we're going to listen to the raisin. Take one bite.
Juna: Hmm. Well, I've never heard it before.
John Denninger: I really like that exercise because it takes something that is incredibly pedestrian,
a raisin. The thing that we throw into our mouths by the handful when we're kids, and it has you
really pay attention to it. In a way that is unusual for us, certainly approaching things like raisin,
but may also be unusual for how people approach food in general.
Eddie: So again, this may sound simple,
Juna and Eddie: but not easy.
Eddie: And I'm certainly guilty of this myself. I'm working on my computer and before I know it, my
lunch has evaporated.
Juna: OK, so I've never eaten a raisin that slowly, ever in my life. In fact, I don't remember the last
time I ate like any food that slowly, because ever since I started dieting, like I would just be so
hungry. By the time I got to the next meal, I would just literally inhale my celery sticks like a
vacuum, and then I'd be like waiting for the next meal counting down. So I wonder if the dieting
was counterproductive in the sense that I was trying to diet to eat less food, but also eating so fast
it makes you eat more because your body doesn't even get a chance to know that it's full.
Eddie: Mm-Hmm.
John Denninger: Noticing what you're tasting, savoring every bite can help you to eat less and can
also help you to eat differently.
Eddie: Juna, maybe this is a good time for us to take a short break, and then we can talk about
some other mind-body practices like meditation.
Juna: OK, Eddie, but could I have another raisin?
Eddie Oh, sure.
Eddie: So, Juna, we've been talking about stress and eating and the relationship between the mind
and the body. And I want to ask you, what's been your experience with meditation?
Juna: I think that basically the way my meditation journey has gone, and a lot of my friends’
meditation journey has gone, is that we download some trendy app like Headspace.
Headspace voice: Over the next 10 days, I'm going to be showing you how to get a little bit more
headspace in your life. Begin by taking a few deep breaths, breathing in through the nose
Juna: And I'll do it for three days. And then like, you delete it and you never use it again.
Headspace voice: And out through the mouth.
Juna: So if that's been your experience of meditation, Dr. Denninger does have a few words of
encouragement.
John Denninger: People have this idea that you need to be able to make your mind completely
quiet. You need to be able to turn off your thoughts. Well, as human beings, it is a normal process
to have your brain be coming up with thoughts. And the thing that you're doing in meditation is
not so much trying not to have thoughts as you are trying to notice when you have thoughts that
interrupt whatever the focus is that you've chosen, and then reorient yourself to whatever you
were trying to focus on before.
Juna: So you may already be aware of all the benefits that come from meditation.
John Denninger: Benefits to cognition, increased working memory, decreased reactivity to
negative emotional stimuli.
Juna: But maybe most important to the way we use and abuse, did you like that? Use and abuse
food is the way mindfulness affects something that we call meta-cognition.
John Denninger: People being aware of their own thinking gives us the ability to experience
something negative and notice it as opposed to being it.
Eddie: I love this idea of thinking about our thinking. And the mindfulness practices, like when I go
to a yoga class or I come out of, I'm doing Tai chi now at work.
Juna: Oh, cool.
Eddie: And one of the things that I really enjoy is that it actually gives me like a little bit of a break
between the thing that I hear, and then my response. It's that space in between the thought and
the action. So maybe just that little delay will get me to not reach for the fudgesicle after I've had--
Juna: I was going to say it's like the fudgesicle after. It's like the things that come after you already
made one decision.
Eddie: And there's something compelling about the fudgesicle because if you don't eat it quickly
enough, it just makes a huge mess.
Juna: So you have to eat it fast. Something else that can physiologically change our stress
response, which is crazy like, this will physically change the way your body is responding to stress.
John Denninger: You ever seen a baby breathe? We don't breathe like babies breathe. Their
bellies inflate like little balloons. As grown-ups, especially in our appearance-conscious society, we
so often want our shoulders and chests to be big and our bellies to be flat that we don't allow our
diaphragm to expand and the breath to push our bellies out.
Eddie: So, Juna, here's the really cool thing about breathing. That raisin that you had a few
minutes ago. Your body's already digesting it. You don't have to think about that part, right? Yes,
your blood is flowing and your brain is working, and your temperature is just -- that's all
automatic.
Juna: Yes.
Eddie: On the other hand, you have all these things that you could do volitionally. Like, I'm going
to move my arm. Breathing is in between.
Juna What?
Eddie When you were asleep last night or someone's unconscious, their body keeps on breathing.
Juna: I hope so.
Eddie: But you also have enough control that you could speed up your breathing or, more
importantly to what we're talking about here, you can slow it down. When you slow down your
breathing, you can actually calm your nervous system, lower your heart rate, make yourself less
reactive to all of the stresses that are going on.
Juna: I've heard this a lot, and I've always tried it like, "Oh yeah, I'll try doing one deep breath or
two deep breaths or whatever." It's not the type of thing that like, you should just do one deep
breath. If you do like seven deep breaths, you will really feel a difference. And don't just go. And
then be like, "Oh yeah, I don't feel anything. I'm still so stressed, oh my god."
Eddie: "I want to relax faster than anyone else."
Juna: Yeah, exactly. It's like you can't approach it that way. It really has to be something where you
feel your stomach push out, which for me is a traumatizing experience. Like, I will not face people
when I'm doing this.
Eddie: But even a few minutes ago, when you walked in here stressed out about doing this
podcast--
Juna: And we did the one breath.
Eddie: And that's like a little mini.
Juna: Right.
Eddie: Even a breath like that. You know what my cue is? That freakin little circle on the computer,
the circle of death. When that's floating around there, I just go. That's my cue. [deep breath]
Eddie: Try it at a red light. There's enough of those.
Juna: Yes, and I think if you're feeling very overwhelmed and even taking like a minute will just like
slow down your entire day so that you can actually like think about what's going on and not just be
reacting, reacting, reacting all day.
Eddie: And one of the other cool things is actually the conversation that we're having now. The
social connection.
Juna: So this is actually something really important to talk about when we're talking about stress
reduction. Because Eddie, you're a little bit older than me. We won't say how much, just a little bit
older. So it may not apply to you. But for people of my generation, basically, we talk all the time
through social media. And so in one way, it kind of gets in the way of really meeting people in
person and seeing their facial expressions instead of just seeing emojis all day. This is John
Derringer again from the Institute of Mind-Body Medicine at Mass General.
John Denninger: One of the central things is bonds between us and other humans. And there's
very, very good evidence that social connection is incredibly important for health.
Juna: Plus, not only does being on your phone really take away from you seeing people in real life,
but it also completely changes the way you see the world around you.
John Denninger: In the old days, if you saw lions all the time, there were probably a lot of lions
near you. Nowadays, if you see horrible things, if you see disasters, if you see people starving, if
you see people being abducted and all this kind of stuff, you may get the impression that this is
happening at a much higher rate near you than it actually is. And that is one of the things that
probably raises our stress level in an unhealthy way.
Juna: OK. Do not tell me you haven't seen the news sometimes and just been like, "oh my God,
we're going to die."
Eddie: Let's eat.
Juna: So the message I'm getting here is basically, put down your phone, take deep breaths,
meditate, be present.
Eddie: And I'm going to add one more.
Juna: OK.
Eddie: All right. Because, you know, for some of us, the traditional meditation is not going to do it.
But there's another way of getting into a mindful state, and it just happens to be my favorite topic,
Eddie and Juna: Exercise!
John Denninger: Practices like tai chi and yoga, sometimes we call them like body-mind practices,
instead of mind-body practices, because they start with the body. They can be especially good for
folks who want to do some kind of mindfulness practice and have a harder time entering that
through seated meditation and those sorts of things. So they're great that way.
Juna: OK, so basically overall, we know stress makes you eat more and it changes the kinds of
foods you want, which like I get. But the problem is, Eddie, I don't think there's ever going to be a
time in my life when I don't have stress, like I'm going to be trying to do cool things, which will
always stress me out, you know?
Eddie: And if you didn't have any stress, you'd be stressed out by the boredom.
Juna You'd be stressed as to why you don't have stress.
Eddie: It would be awful. And you know, in the end, to be a little philosophical, we really don't
have control over most of the circumstances of our life.
Juna: Right.
Eddie: If you've ever tried to raise teenagers.
Juna: Can't relate, but yes, OK.
Eddie: But we can make ourselves just a little bit more resilient to the stress. And maybe that's
what we're after here.
Juna: So doing mindfulness exercises or breathing deeply or exercises like yoga and tai chi, those
things make you better able to cope with the stress you have.
Eddie: And even if you only did like a little mini relaxation like we did at the beginning of this
podcast, one deep breath. Even that can help you maybe slow your heart rate, reduce your body's
response to the stress, and maybe just give you that little space where the next choice you make is
not reaching for,
Juna: The fudgesicle after the chocolate cake and ice cream. Probably, probably a better decision
not to do that.
Eddie: I'll take a deeper breath next time.
Juna: Thanks to our Stress-Free guests, Dr. John Denninger and Dr. Marc Potenza. If what you're
hearing blisses you out, please leave a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your
podcasts because it helps us reach more listeners. And if you want to see me and Eddie try lapsang
souchong this week, be sure to follow us on Instagram because we post all the time and it's
awesome.
Eddie: And relaxing. And if what you're hearing leaves you with a burning question, soothe
yourself by sending a voice memo to foodweneedtotalk@gmail.com.
Juna: Next week's episode is going to be our second Q&A bonus episode focused on exercise. You
guys sent in so many great questions and we cannot wait to answer them. And in the meantime, if
you could do us the tiniest favor and take a five-minute survey at WBUR.org/FoodSurvey, it would
really help us out, especially if you're interested in us doing a season two. Please go to
WBUR.org/FoodSurvey. It'll really help us out. Food, We Need To Talk is a production of WBUR.
Eddie: Our editor and producer is George Hicks.
Juna: Our supervising editor is Elisabeth Harrison and our executive producer is Carrie Goldberg.
Eddie: With additional editorial and technical guidance from Catherine Brewer, Paul Vickous, and
The WBUR iLab. I'm Dr. Eddy Phillips.
Juna: And I'm Juna Gjata, and I'm going to go take a relaxing bath.
Eddie: And I'm going to finish the raisins.
Juna: Those are already gone.
