Break-ups are tough. Your emotions are all over the place, and according to the findings of a recent scientific study, so are your eating habits.
The evidence?
The study, which took place in the Netherlands, gives us a scientific explanation for the post break-up phenomenon of having no appetite to suddenly wanting to eat everything in sight.
The findings are relatively simple—it all comes down to your hormones, which are thrown for a loop after the end of a relationship. Your body’s initial response to the sudden post break-up hormone change is to go into fight-or-flight mode, especially if you weren’t the one who ended things.
Once your body has entered into this mode, your heart rate will rise and the levels of cortisol and adrenaline in your body will increase. These side effects will result in you experiencing more trouble sleeping and a limited desire to eat.
Gert ter Horst, a professor of neurobiology from the Netherlands, explains that the stress from a break-up causes your sympathetic nervous system to take charge, which reduces the importance your body places on eating and suppresses your feelings of hunger by slowing down your body’s digestion.
The rollercoaster emotions that accompany your break-up also contribute to your inability to eat. “The areas of the brain in charge of emotions and emotional pain also [regulate] how we eat, our need for food, and what we taste,” Horst explains. “The areas that take care of these functions are close together, and can influence one another.” Which is why it’s completely normal for you to want nothing to do with your favorite foods while mourning the loss of your relationship.
But, once your desire to eat comes back, it comes back in full, fatty force. The stress that comes with heartache, combined with your body’s decreased level of oxytocin, the hormone released when you fall in love and that plummets when you break-up, causes your body to crave calories. This means you’re more likely to choose pizza, ice cream and chocolate over their healthier counterparts.
As if that’s not bad enough, men and women process break-ups differently, and this eat-nothing-then-binge-eat-everything-in-sight pattern occurs among women more frequently than men. But regardless, if you’re nursing a broken heart with a wacky diet, just know that you’re not alone. And nothing lasts forever.