It’s not just our imagination: We really do eat differently when we’re stressed. Nutritionists at UC Davis and the Western Human Nutrition Research Center are shedding light on the important link between stress, our brain and body weight, discoveries that could help society fight obesity and improve our individual efforts to lose weight and keep it off.

 “It is becoming clear that stress degrades our ability to make healthy food choices for long-term well-being,” said Kevin Laugero, a research nutritionist with the Western Human Nutrition Research Center and an adjunct professor with the UC Davis Department of Nutrition. “Knowledge of dietary guidelines is important, but we also have to help people, from a very early age, find ways to manage stress and develop their capacity to choose long-term gain over short-term reward.”

Dieting involves an ongoing series of decisions, essentially weighing short-term reward against long-term consequences (e.g., “I know I should choose the apple, but that apple pie sure smells good”). Laugero was on a team that recently studied these questions: Does our ability to recognize the long-term consequences of our decisions affect our weight management? Are there physiological factors, like stress, that affect how we make decisions? 

The short answers: yes and yes. Working with 29 volunteers, researchers discovered that the dieters who were better at making decisions based on long-term consequences were more successful at maintaining weight loss. And, volunteers with the highest level of cortisol, a hormone induced by stress and produced by the adrenal gland, were more influenced by short-term reward and lost fewer pounds.

You can read more about their study and conclusions on the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Studies website.