Cindy Hamilton, 40, of Highwood, Illinois, has a trainer, works out four times a week, and ran the Marine Corps Marathon last year—and yet she's gained seven pounds since November's contentious presidential election.
"I'll watch cable news while eating straight from a five-pound vat of licorice," she confesses. "It numbs my worry. Plus, I'm like, 'Everything's going to sh*t, so I might as well eat candy.' I never understood emotional eating before, but now, having a bagel and cream cheese makes me feel better in the moment."
Studies, and scales nationwide, show that Hamilton isn't alone. The
sordid combination of heated political sparring and 24/7 news coverage
of world calamity and crises—made worse by the attendant social media
chatter and trolling—has driven more than half the U.S. population to
eat, drink, or smoke as a result of the election, according to a survey
by online health-care portal CareDash.com. Six percent of women have
gained enough weight to cause them to see, or consider seeing, a doctor
about it.
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"Eating habits are greatly influenced
by stress, anxiety, and other negative emotions, regardless of what
triggers them—politics, work, or personal relationships," says
Darnestown, Maryland, psychotherapist Steven Stosny, Ph.D., who coined
the 2016 phrase "election stress disorder" and, more recently, "headline
stress disorder." Constant exposure to terrorism scares and
climate-change warnings, Stosny says, "creates a war-zone mentality in
your brain, with each headline seeming like a little missile attack
you're hoping doesn't hit you." Small wonder that Ashley Womble, a
36-year-old communications director in New York City, has been avoiding
the gym. "They play cable news nonstop," she says. "I listen to music on
my headphones, but whenever I look up from the treadmill, all I see is
the news." Womble estimates she's now running five or so miles a week, as opposed to the 10 to 15 she was logging a year ago.
Some have called postelection weight gain the "Trump 15," but headline-induced anxiety
is nonpartisan: A post-election survey by the American Psychological
Association found that national stress levels saw the sharpest rise in
10 years, with 59 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats
begging for a Brexit from reality.
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It's not uncommon to put on pounds in response to major life stressors, sometimes called "weight shocks" by researchers, whether the shocks are personal or global in nature. (Germans call weight gained from emotional overeating kummerspeck—literally, "grief bacon.") Simply thinking about a stressful event that you've experienced makes you burn 104 fewer calories—about 11 pounds' worth per year—per a study in Biological Psychiatry, and the study authors expect that a similar effect could happen when we ruminate about a nerve-wracking headline.
One culprit is hormones, says Fatima Cody Stanford, M.D., an
obesity-medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
Medical School in Boston. "When you're upset, levels of the stress
hormone cortisol rise, prompting cravings
for sweet or high-fat foods." Those urges are a throwback to
prehistoric times, when we would stockpile calories in anticipation of
famine. Similarly, when you freak out over current events, "your body
thinks, Something I care about is at stake, and it compels you to eat,"
says Washington, D.C., dietitian Rebecca Scritchfield, R.D. You're apt
to choose comfort foods like mac 'n' cheese or doughnuts, because carbs
act "like edible Xanax," she says, "stimulating the body to produce the
feel-good chemical serotonin."
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A social media
habit can also make you lose sleep, another pathway to extra pounds.
When you lag behind in Zs, your body can release ghrelin, the "feed me!"
hormone, says Scritchfield. Late-night scrolling compounds the problem:
The headlines may get your blood boiling, and the blue-screen light
from your device affects how much and how well you sleep. Christine
Knapp, a 39-year-old massage therapist in Los Angeles, blames her recent
yo-yoing weight on bad bedtime rituals. "I look at the news on Twitter
and I'm mindlessly munching,
and suddenly an hour has gone by. I crawl into bed and can't fall
asleep, then I wake up with nightmares." She has gained back six of the
12 pounds she'd lost before the election.
Sleep deprivation also hinders your greatest weapon in the fight
against headline-induced stress: exercise. Not only does working out
spur endorphins, but it fuels emotional resiliency. "When you work out
hard," says Scritchfield, "your mind often says, 'I want to stop.' But
if you press through those pushups or that last five minutes of a run,
it's like strength training for your brain. It builds mental toughness."
So the next time you're faced with an emotional challenge—like reading
an upsetting article—and you want to eat a cookie, you realize, "You
know what? I'm stronger than this." And you are.
