Cortisol and Stress Hormones
A Binge Eating Connection 

Cortisol and Adrenalin are two of our body’s important stress hormones. And many people who suffer from binge eating disorder will tell you that stress is a BIG contributor to their problems with food cravings…..so what’s the connection?

Many people are aware of the “fight or flight” response to stress. That means that our bodies are primed to react to threatening or dangerous situations by releasing a surge of energy, enabling us to fight the threat or run away from it.

Adrenalin and Cortisol are the body’s hormones that help kick this reaction into gear!

Now that’s all well and good if we have to fight or run to survive (as in the ‘cave man’ days) but we still get the same reactions happening in our bodies from the stresses of everyday modern life.

(Learn more about the causes and symptoms of stress here).

So how might this affect our food cravings?

Erratic eating patterns such as occur in Binge Eating disorder can lead to low blood sugars. Our body will register this as a THREAT and signal ‘ALERT……need for food urgently’. The stress hormones Adrenalin and Cortisol will be released……and we will experience the symptoms of stress such as shakiness, racing heart and  anxiety, as well as the effects of low blood sugar itself such as tiredness and light headedness, as an intense need for food.

So guess what? We binge on whatever food is to hand, often energy dense convenience foods. As a result, our blood sugars rise……and the release of stress hormones slows. We feel the relief from the anxiety, shakiness, racing heart (or whatever our individual symptoms are) going away, and so in our minds eating = relief and comfort.

(However, as we know from our page on blood sugars, binge eating on energy dense foods can lead to a resulting DROP in blood sugars later on……and so the chain reaction can be triggered off again!)

We therefore have learnt to associate eating with the relief of distressing symptoms, and this may go someway to explain why we tend to ‘comfort eat’ so often. The next time we feel anxious or fearful about something else, we may turn to food again in an effort to get the same feeling of soothing relief.

If, as so often happens, stress has become a chronic feature of our lives, the constant secretion of stress hormones can have other effects possibly adding to food cravings.

This can be as a result of the effects upon our digestive tract. Cortisol slows down our digestive system (because our body is conserving its energy for the fight or flight response), and when this is combined with eating convenience and fast food, then our essential nutrient levels may become low. Such a pattern of poor eating and high stress levels will have knock-on effects upon our Serotonin and Endorphin levels and this can exacerbate our food cravings.