The stress you feel in your mind can contribute significantly to the stress you feel in your waistline. When you find yourself caught in situations of hair pulling, your body produces cortisol, the stress hormone, which causes blood sugar to drop and fatty food cravings to be activated. Instead of taking a pint of road ice cream or a steaming bowl of macaroni and cheese, stock up on our healthy staples that relieve stress below.
These essential foods will help you calm down and refocus so you can continue your thin and stress-free day. And if you want healthy recipes, grocery shopping guides and essential nutritional tips at your fingertips, subscribe to the new Eat This, Not That! magazine now! For a limited time, you can save 50 percent of the coverage price.
1-Dark chocolate
Breaking a Kit-Kat bar can help dissolve tension and anxiety for a few transient minutes, but biting 70 percent dark chocolate can have more lasting and relaxing effects. A study in the Journal of Proteome Research found that highly stressed people who only consumed an ounce and a half of dark chocolate daily for two consecutive weeks reduced their stress hormone levels. In addition, another study from the International Journal of Health Sciences found that both dark and milk chocolates helped relieve stress in students, especially women. The researchers suspect that these relaxing effects are due to cocoa flavonoids, antioxidants that minimize oxidative stress and provide cardio-protective benefits.
2-Strawberries
Because of their high vitamin C content, strawberries are a powerful snack to eliminate stress. A study in the Pakistan Journal of Biological Sciences found that, after supplementing students in the study with vitamin C for two weeks, participants showed reduced anxiety, which led researchers to believe that a diet rich in vitamin C It can help treat anxiety and improve academic performance. Only one cup of sliced strawberries is loaded with approximately 98 milligrams of water-soluble vitamin, that’s more than 100 percent of your recommended daily value!
3-Wild Salmon
Wild salmon has a great advantage over its cultivated counterpart: it is loaded with significantly more omega-3 fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats that have cardio-protective benefits (goodbye, heart disease) and help fight inflammation and nourish the skin. In fact, a study in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity found that students who supplemented their diet with these healing fats experienced 20 percent less anxiety symptoms and 14 percent less inflammation than the control group.
