How to Eat for Stress Management

“Let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food.”

-Hippocrates, “The Father of Medicine”, circa 400 B.C.

It is simple and obvious to say that what you eat has profound effects on your health - but I bet you don't know how to eat for stress management ...

Indeed, your diet may be the single largest determining factor in whether or not you get sick or stay healthy.

It’s very natural for people to draw a relationship based on unhealthy eating and, say, obesity, or high cholesterol & blood pressure, or any number of other physical ailments.

But for some reason, people don’t make the same connection between diet and stress-related injuries like anxiety and depression.

The connection exists, and it’s a two way street: stress affects the way that you eat, and the way you eat affects your stress management.

From the perspective of stress management, managing your diet is another HARDCORE technique for fundamentally raising your threshold for stress.

The main reason that diet qualifies as a HARDCORE Stress Management™ technique (apart from being effective, and drug-free) is that it is proactive.

By proactive, we mean it’s a technique that you can use before you get sick, in order to ensure that you don’t get sick. It is preventative in that it deals with the root cause – the stress.

This differs strongly from the use of an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drug, where wait around until you get sick and then treat the symptoms. This is reactive and symptomatic treatment, and it does not deal with the root cause.

Altering your diet can have an immediate effect on how well you handle stress because different foods require different amounts of energy for your body to process.

The more energy required to process a given food, the less beneficial that food is to helping you fight off the effects of stress.

What are some of these foods?

Raw fruits and raw or lightly cooked vegetables are the easiest foods for your body to process and digest. They are healthy, cleansing, and do the most for your body in the context of stress management.

The "best of the best" of fruits and vegetables are melons. Melons are such a perfect human food that many of them pass directly from your mouth to the digestive tract without any processing by the stomach at all!

On the other end of the spectrum, the foods that require the most effort for your body to process relative to the energy derived are the highly refined, complex carbohydrates – white pastas, white rice, white bread, white potatoes (noticing a pattern here?), etc.

Somewhere in the middle of the food-for-stress-management spectrum are the cooked meats: fish, chicken, beef, etc. When it comes to meats, the rule is the leaner the better.

It’s not just that there are foods that are bad from a stress management perspective, and foods that are good. It’s also a matter of how you eat those same foods which has important effects.

First there are the principles of food combining. You may never have heard of this concept, but food combining is the art of only eating foods that are "compatible" with one another during a single meal.

While beyond the scope of this article, simple food combining basics include rules such as:

• Don’t combine fruit with meat in the same meal
• Green leafy vegetables combine well with everything
• Melons are best eaten in a meal by themselves

Then there is the matter of portion size, and how often to eat …

The simple fact of the matter is that your body takes cues from what and how you eat to determine how prevalent food is in your environment and whether it’s of high quality.

If you eat infrequently, say once or twice a day, even if it’s a large meal your body will process that information and assume that food is relatively scarce.

In response to this, your metabolism will slow down, and your body will try to store as much energy in the form of fat as it can. You are basically telling your body that your current environment is a stressful one, and that it should go into resource-saving mode immediately.

However, if you eat several small meals throughout the day, say 4 or 6, with a comparatively small portion size, the opposite will occur.

Your body will assume that food in your environment is plentiful, and will allow your metabolism to speed up. You’re body will transition from a fat-storing mode to a fat-burning mode, and you will respond better to stress.

Changing your dietary habits is admittedly one of the hardest things for anyone to do – we are attached to our favorite foods and our favorite ways to eat them in a surprisingly powerful way.

But you will find that when you combine these different techniques, choosing the correct foods and eating them in the correct fashion, the benefits of HARDCORE Stress Management™ will present themselves.

Work yourself into any dietary change slowly – “cold turkey” style drastic changes in diet, even if well-intentioned, can end up causing more stress than they solve!

And remember, always check with your doctor (general practitioner) before embarking on any new diet program – unforeseen health issues can be aggravated by changes in diet.

Hungry? Me too! When you're done with that (healthy) snack, check out my HARDCORE Stress Management™ program.