Lifestyle Choices

A great many of my patients do not really know what stress actually is. They think that it’s an outside force causing them to feel tense. But that’s not stress — that’s a stressor. Stress is a person’s negative reaction to a stressor.

For the most part, people have a negative reaction to stressors when they feel that their stressors are greater than their ability to deal with them. When they feel like this, they see their stressors as threats. On the other hand, if they think they can handle their stressors, they usually see them as challenges and generally enjoy grappling with them.

If you now feel as if your life is full of threats, instead of challenges, you are experiencing stress. If your degree of stress is severe, it’s going to be quite difficult for you to live a balanced, healthy lifestyle free from compulsion, including the compulsion to overeat.

To succeed, you must overcome this stress.

On occasion, I’ve had patients who initially mastered the physical elements of the False Fat Diet — such as exercise and the avoidance of reactive foods — but who ultimately failed to keep their weight off because of stress. They just couldn’t cope with the stressors in their lives, and this eventually ruined their diets. They began to engage in stress eating, and eventually felt too emotionally exhausted to maintain a regular programme of exercise.

For example, I had a 29-year-old patient named Darlene, who initially did very well on her diet. She lost about 18 pounds in four months. But the weight loss didn’t last.

Darlene had credit card debt which she worried about far too much. Every minor financial setback made her feel threatened and sent her into a state of anxiety. When she felt anxious, she ’stuffed down’ her anxiety with food. She avoided eating reactive foods, but she ate too many calories.

Darlene made the classic mistake that most often creates stress. She perceived her financial situation as a threat to her well-being, instead of a challenge. She eventually paid off her credit card debt, but she never achieved balance in her lifestyle, and she slowly regained her weight.

At about the same time that I was treating Darlene, I was also working with another weight-control patient, Thomas, who had even more debt. His small company had gone out of business, saddling him with a lot of debt. However, Thomas had excellent coping skills and just didn’t let the debt get him down. He perceived paying it off as the biggest challenge of his life and attacked the problem with gusto. It took him much longer to become debt-free than it did Darlene, but it never encroached upon his lifestyle and never destroyed his diet.

More than anything else, it’s our perceptions that cause stress.

There are a few fundamental ways to help perceive stressors as challenges, instead of threats. If you work these methods into your life, you’ll probably feel a lot less stress and will enjoy a much healthier, more balanced lifestyle. The three fundamental coping skills that I most often recommend are control, support, and release.

Control is vitally important; feeling as if you’re in control of a stressor is the best way to make it feel like a challenge, instead of a threat.

There are a number of ways to feel in control. One of the best is simply to realize that you can never control every outside force, but that you can almost always control how you react to those forces internally. The next time you have a stressor that feels beyond your control, focus on changing the way you feel about it.

Another great way to stay in control of your life is simply to tell people how you really feel about some problem that they may be causing you. Don’t aggressively blame them, or they’ll get defensive. Just tell them you’ve got a problem and ask politely for their help. You’ll be amazed at how much people will want to co-operate with you when you’re honest and straightforward.

It’s also important to give a lot of thought to what you most want, and stop worrying about controlling the little things that don’t matter much. Figure out what your bottom-line desires are and put your energy into achieving them. In essence, don’t sweat the small stuff.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to fail. The path to every major achievement is littered with small setbacks.

Support is also an excellent stress-buster, because having a support system of friends and family helps people feel far more confident about dealing with their stressors. When people have that terrible, lonely feeling of ‘me against the world,’ every minor stressor can feel like a threat. The support of other people, though, makes people feel protected.

Often, people think that not asking for help makes them stronger. In regard to health and well-being, though, this isn’t true. Being overly self-reliant makes people far more prone to illness. One study, for example, showed that people who had no support system of good friends or family were three times more likely to die from illness than people who felt supported.

Even talking to strangers about your problems can help. A study of people who told strangers about their problems showed that these people had significantly lower levels of stress hormones than people who kept their problems to themselves.

Having a pet can also help. Many studies have shown that people with pets are less prone to stress, and have notably less incidence of stress-related illness than people who don’t have pets.

Release is also vital for keeping stressors from becoming stress. When you feel stressed, let it out. If you hold in your reactions to stressors, the stressors may begin to feel far more oppressive than they really are. But if you let yourself release the tension that stressors may cause, the tension will be far less likely to mount up and turn into full-blown, chronic stress.

One of the best ways to release stress is with physical activity. The human body is naturally designed to react to stress with the fight-or-flight response, characterized by increased heart rate and increased energy to the muscles. Therefore, it makes sense to burn off this extra energy with activity. If you just sit on your feeling of physical agitation, your body will suffer. People who internalize stress, instead of releasing it, often develop problems such as ulcers and heart disease.

Another great form of release is to vent your frustration verbally. You can let go of stress by talking, crying, or yelling. Just be careful not to direct your verbal venting at another person, or you’ll just make your problems worse by creating conflict. Be sensitive and treat people with respect. Venting is just as effective when you’re alone.

That’s the best possible advice I can offer about overcoming stress. This advice was gleaned from a large number of the best current books about stress, as well as from the experiences I’ve had in my own clinical practice and the advice I’ve received from other health professionals.

If you make the effort to integrate this advice into your life, you’ll probably be far less vulnerable than ever before to the forces that made you overeat due to stress.

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