Do Women Eat More During Their Menstrual Cycles?
September 7th, 2012
Women experience a variety of symptoms during their menstrual cycles. Bloating, cramping, anger, fatigue, depression, and migraines are just some of the things many women must cope with each month during their childbearing years. Women commonly report having cravings for salty or sweet foods during and before their menstrual cycles. Eating for reasons other than to satisfy hunger could be indicative of underlying mental health issues. Much attention has been given to eating issues in women with anxiety, depression, body image issues, and other problems, but less has been focused on emotional eating. Taken a step further, little research has been conducted on the relationship between emotional eating during the menstrual cycle. To provide information on how hormonal changes can affect emotional eating, Kelly L. Klump of Michigan State University’s Department of Psychology recently led a study that assessed the eating patterns and hormonal states of 196 women over the course of 45 days.
Klump evaluated the saliva of participants to determine their levels of progesterone and estradiol and how they interacted to influence cravings. She found that fluctuations in the hormones directly correlated to increases in emotional eating. Specifically, the women reported more emotional eating when their levels of progesterone and estradiol were the highest. Klump also considered mood and body mass index and found that neither factor affected the results. “These findings are significant in suggesting potential causal associations between hormonal changes across the reproductive cycle and emotional eating,” she said. Klump added that more research is needed, especially with respect to exploring these links in additional human and animal studies. However, the results of this study could provide valuable insight into variables that could affect the eating behaviors of people diagnosed with binge eating issues, and might help clinicians design treatment plans with hormonal fluctuations in mind.
Reference:
Klump, K. L., Keel, P. K., Racine, S. E., Burt, A. S., Neale, M., Sisk, C. L., Boker, S., Hu, J. Y. (2012). The interactive effects of estrogen and progesterone on changes in emotional eating across the menstrual cycle. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0029524
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11 Comments | Click here to leave a comment.
Comments
I don’t know about the other ladies but I know I do!
I am always so emotional in the week or so before I have my period and I guess eating has always been my go to way to cope when I get sad and depressed.
It always tastes good and it feels good at the moment!
Luckily I never eat so much that I gain more than a pound or so, which is easily remedied with some hearty workouts afterward.
Maybe this isn’t ideal, but it works for me and has been kind of my staple for twenty years.
Why knock it out now ;p
Look, eating during your menstrual cycle is not about some underlying mental despair. It’s a way to make you feel better, that’s it!
While hormonal changes may bring about excessive eating in women I don;t see why that’s a problem.Some of us are just more vulnerable to emotional eating and if this is triggered by a natural event then I don’t see an issue to be concerned!
I agree with all of the other women who have posted here and I think that we would DARE a man to post and tell us something otherwise.
Obviously this study was conducted by a man who has never experienced these hormonal fluctuations and who think that it HAS to boil down to some kind of mental illness to let one time a month create this havoc.
And quite obviously they are wrong.
Not to start off a war of the sexes here but this study could give us an insight on changes occurring due to hormonal changes.You know when you are faced with a threatening situation there is more adrenaline in your body than at other times.What you do after is due to hormonal changes.SO there really is no harm in studying something like this and coming out with the results.
The only way that I see how this could be helpful could be for those women who are trying to lose weight and then are disrupted in their efforts by their hormonal fluctuations. This could be a real downer for many of them who are trying so hard to lose weight but who get sidelined in their efforts because of internal things that are beyond their control.
Do women eat more during their menstrual cycles?yes,as I can say from my own experience.But that may not be the case with all women because I have known a few friends who just eat lesser and lesser during their period.I don’t know how the same thing manifests differently in different people,may be it is hormonal but doesn’t that mean the results would be uniform?(confused!)
Why does this have to fall under the department of psychology?
Does the college of women’s medicine not care enough to conduct studies like this?
I think that simply implying that this is related to mental issues is enough to tick me off just a little.
now this could throw off some women’s weight loss plans, thereby sending them into more of a ‘hormonal charge’.this is not good and there needs to be measures these women can use to help themselves.
All I have to say is that even if I thought my wife was eating more, do you think that I would have anything close to nerve enough to say that to her? And so what if she is, why should I say anything about it at all? Maybe this will make her a little happier for a while and save all of us from an emotional breakdown!
I must be the complete opposite, because many times when I have my period or even in the days leading up to it, my stomach hurts so bad that the last thing that I want to do is eat. For some people this is an emotional comfort though, and I think that we should look more at not whether they eat more during this time but instead see if this is a coping mechanism that they have developed and will then use to cope with the pain and discomfort of their monthly cycles.
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