Post-Stress Overeating

She will regret it afterwards...

"Everyone is dead and everything is terrible and I! AM! MAKING! PANCAKES!"

— Max Olguin, Airlocked

People do things that help them lower stress and try to forget after a hard day. Sometimes people try to drink their problems away. Others try to eat their body weight in ice cream. This type of behavior is a fairly common coping mechanism in both fiction and Real Life. This usually takes place after a fight with a loved one or some other type of high-level emotional distress, usually while lamenting about who or what is bothering them.

Compare Heartbreak and Ice Cream, Comfort Food, and the alcoholic equivalent Drowning My Sorrows. Many of these characters experience Weight Woe due to this. It also may lead to Formerly Fit. Contrast Too Unhappy to Be Hungry, where distress leads a character to not eat.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cells at Work: Bacteria!: Following a supposedly bad break-up, the host body has taken to eaten more meat in general, which causes her to have varying levels of intestinal distress.
• Fresh Pretty Cure!: After realizing that Miki already has a boyfriend and his hundredth defeat in attempting to ask her out, Yuuki goes on a binge of donuts while crying. As he puts it to the clerk "If it's gonna be like that, I'll just stuff my face. Old man, give 'em to me nonstop!".
• After having a minor squabble with Sae, Hiro of Hidamari Sketch goes on a binge eating tons of food from cake and donuts to curry, always with a "><" on her face and constantly saying things like "Stupid Sae".
• Magi: Labyrinth of Magic:
  • Played for laughs as both Aladdin and Alibaba after the events of the Balbadd arc did this for months to the point they became grossly overweight. In Aladdin's case, Morgiana and Ja'far spoiled him rotten with treats so he wouldn't have to think about Ugo's death.
  • In the Alma Torran flashback, Sheba aggressively ate everything at the table after she saw her Precocious Crush Solomon having a close moment with who she believed was her rival Arba. Her son Aladdin happened to share this trait.
• After a visit by her deadbeat father, Kanna from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid gets rid of her stress by angrily scarfing down a massive amount of cream bread. Kobayashi and Tohru both end up comparing her behavior to Elma.
• In My Hero Academia, the stress of having to raise a non-superpowered son in a setting where superhumans make up roughly 80% of the population led to Izuku Midoriya's mother developing a habit of stress-eating, which explains her currently chubby physique.
• When Kanou from Nurse Angel Ririka SOS began spending time with Miyuki, Ririka became mad. She ended up eating five crepes in one sitting. Her friends only watched in astonishment.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica Kyoko goes off on a binge after she loses an argument with Sayaka. In a variant of this, it's also implied that her Big Eater tendencies are a coping mechanism for her Dark and Troubled Past; namely, her family starving after her priest father got excommunicated, and later his killing the rest of her family and himself after finding out about Kyoko's contract. Later, she scarfs down a huge amount of food when trying to figure out if she can recover Sayaka's Soul Gem after she becomes a witch.
• Usagi tends to do this in the first anime of Sailor Moon, usually after fights with Mamoru. Not so much in the manga.
• One Star Ocean EX has Rena do this in a panic after she mistakenly thinks she saw Claude and Celine smooching.
• Midora from Toriko takes this trope to a massive villainous level. He became a Villainous Glutton with a huge appetite in order to cope with the loss of Frohze.

Fan Works

• In the Dusk to Dawn series, Catwoman is a Big Eater, so food is her preferred stress reliever. This comes from being homeless and fending off starvation every day as a kid. In the first book Batman: Angel of Death, when she learns her little sister has grown into a cult's Super-Soldier, Selina makes a beeline for the fridge and gorges on whatever she can find, including raw eggs.
  Selina: It's easier to believe everything's gonna be fine on a full stomach, okay?!
• Broken Spirit features a mourning Cyborg going off to gorge himself on pizza and milkshakes when BeastBoy is believed to be dead (he's actually only visible to Raven with his separated body in dimensional limbo). Starfire moves to join him, and Robin only hesitates a moment before solemnly offering to pay for the first round as he follows.

Films — Animation

• Hiro and Tadashi's Aunt Cass does this in Big Hero 6 when she berates the two of them ending up in jail because of Hiro's bot fighting.
  Cass: [angrily eating a donut] Stress eating, because of you! [...] Mmm, this is really good...
• In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Peter B. Parker (an older, jaded version of Spider-Man from an alternate universe) lapsed into this after Aunt May died and he and his wife MJ divorced. After moving out, he lounges around his bachelor apartment gorging himself on pizza until he develops a noticeable gut that almost everyone in the movie points out.
• In Shrek 2, this is a Running Gag with Fairy Godmother.
  "My diet is ruined! I hope you're happy."
• In addition to Comfort Food, Kung Fu Panda's Po eats when he's upset.

Films — Live-Action

• Eat (2014) features a twisted version of this, as Novella McClure develops the habit of eating chunks of her own flesh in response to stress.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Thor, Big Eater Volstagg defends his enormous meal with this trope after Fandral accuses him of disinterest in Asgard's dire straits.
  • During the events of Avengers: Infinity War, Thor witnesses Thanos killing half of his people, including his brother and his best friend, and later fails to kill Thanos in time because he was too focussed on getting his revenge. This leads to Thanos killing half of all life in the universe. In Avengers: Endgame, before the mission to the Garden, where the Avengers hope to get the Infinity Stones to reverse Thanos's fingersnap, Thor is shown eating a bowl of bread in addition to drinking alcohol. After it is revealed that Thanos destroyed the Stones and with them all hope to reverse the snap, Thor passes the Despair Event Horizon, and when we see him again after a five-year time jump, it's made abundantly clear from how his house in New Asgard is littered with discarded wings, pizza boxes, and snack wrappers that he's been eating way too much junk food.
• The Wedding Year: After running out on her wedding to Robbie, Violet goes to a fast food joint and downs three and a half cheeseburgers.
• The Whale: Charlie is a recluse who spends most of his time binge-eating pizza and other unhealthy foods as a coping mechanism for both losing his gay partner, Alan, to suicide and being estranged from his wife and daughter for several years. Even when he is told he only has one week to live, he still refuses to quit these habits. He gets worse when he finally gets noticed by the pizza delivery man, going wild on eating a vast amount of junk food to the point of violently throwing up.

Literature

• Deconstructed in The Babysitters Club book Stacey's Emergency. Stacey begins eating a lot of sweets due to her sadness. However, it complicates her diabetes, which results in her being sent to the hospital.
• In Maiden Crown, Princess Sophie's aunt Gertrud spiraled into depression after losing nine children in infancy before she was even thirty, which she dealt with by staying bedridden and eating sweets every day to the point of growing fat and feeble.
• One Fat Summer: After a disastrous first day at his summer job, Bobby Marks returns home and binges on ice cream. This is actually a common coping method for him as his parents don't even bat an eye at seeing the empty tubs.
• Demonstrated graphically and constantly in She's Come Undone, where the main character initially turns to food after being raped at age 13 and continues to overeat to cope with emotional stress, resulting in obesity.

Live-Action TV

• You can tell Jack Donaghy of 30 Rock is stressed when he starts binge-eating like crazy.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): After the Time Skip at the end of season 2, Lee Adama has a serious weight problem. It's eventually revealed through flashbacks that he turned to overeating after his Love Interest, Starbuck, rather suddenly married Anders instead.
• In one episode of Derry Girls the girls are told to completely re-write a class assignment in just one evening. This makes them so stressed that they binge their way through a cupboard full of sweets Erin's mother was saving for Christmas.
• Leo Knox from The Finder is this. Before the series, he had gained weight after the death of his wife and daughter but had lost a lot of weight with the help of Walter, but he reaches for junk food when dealing with emotions. This is especially evident in "The Conversation" where the gang is helping a family that reminds Leo of his own family. Leo at first denies that what he is eating is connected to his emotions.
  Sometimes a ding dong is just a ding dong.
• In Fargo episode "Aporia", Nikki has stolen Varga's laptop and blackmails him for the content. He resorts to aggressively eating a tub of ice cream on the toilet.
• Frasier
  • Daphne's dramatic weight gain (in reality the result of actress Jane Leeves' pregnancy) was attributed in-universe to stress-eating caused by her anxiety at trying to live up to Niles' lofty expectations.
  • After going through a state of depression over a breakup, Frasier begins binge eating, and ends up putting on several pounds in a very short amount of time.
• On The Golden Girls, all of the housemates were prone to this, but Blanche was usually the first person to reach for the cheesecake when things went wrong. In one episode, a class reunion gone wrong has her pulling a Cut a Slice, Take the Rest on Sophia's lasagna at 9:00 AM; in another, Dorothy walks in on her frantically pulling food from the fridge and quips "Hungry or suicidal?"
• The Good Detective: Played for Drama. In episode 2.5 Na-na finds out that she will in fact be passed over for leadership of TJ Group, the family's huge business conglomerate, in favor of her brother. Tae-ho comes home to find his wife in near-hysterics, literally stuffing cakes into her mouth—and she is a diabetic.
• Joan of Arcadia: At the end of "The Election," both Joan and Helen are facing troubles: the candidate Joan backed for class president at God's request has failed (although God knew that would happen), and Helen was unable to prevent a controversial art piece from being pulled from a student showcase despite her best efforts. They commiserate in the kitchen, and Joan pulls a Sara Lee chocolate dessert out of the freezer; while Helen protests "Just a taste," her daughter assures her that they're both depressed and thus free to eat the whole thing.
• Modern Family: In "Summer Lovin'", Andy attends the Dunphys' Fourth of July barbecue on a "wedding diet" since he's engaged to Beth. Unfortunately, he inadvertently overhears Phil and Claire talking about how Haley tried to stop him from proposing to Beth, and the stress of realizing that she still loves him (plus the fact that he's doubting his own feelings for Beth) makes him start devouring sweets. By the time Labor Day rolls around, he's ballooned up to the point where Haley doesn't recognize him.
• In Monk, this was how Dale "The Whale" Biederbeck got to his current state: after his mother's death, he dealt with his grief by engaging in binge-eating (his physician remarks that "he'd call restaurants and have them send everything on their menus"), causing him to become so fat he can't even get out of bed.
• This was a Running Gag, often heavily lampshaded, on The Nanny. Fran coped with every stressful situation—usually romance-related, but work, her nagging mother, and fear of aging were also common causes—by reaching for sweets and pastries. In one episode, a Rhetorical Question Blunder occurs:
  Fran: How long have you people known me? What's the first thing I do when I get upset?
  Maggie: Eat a box of Mallomars!
• In the show Pushing Daisies, Olive "stress-binged" on the pies that Ned "stress-baked".
• On Saturday Night Live, recurring character Stuart Smalley, in one of his final appearances on the show, is hosting his show, "Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley", but he can't get through it because he's depressed over his movie, Stuart Saves His Family tanking at the box office despite glowing reviews from critics. He instead, spends the sketch binge eating a variety of Pepperidge Farm cookies, and chewing out the audience for not watching his movie.
• David Rose on Schitt's Creek stress eats, especially after a romantic breakup.
• Star Trek: Picard: After experiencing a fit of anxiety in "Nepenthe", Dr. Agnes Jurati attempts to calm herself down by gorging on two large pieces of cake, and she manages to eat a mouthful a third before she pukes out the red velvet she had recently consumed.
• Ugly Betty: When faced with big stressors, e.g. the possibility of losing her job, Amanda Tanen can clean a pan of flan in a matter of minutes. The discovery that she is adopted, and the now-deceased Fey Sommers is her real mother, and her father is unknown causes her to pack on plot-relevant pounds between Seasons 1 and 2.

Puppet Shows

• In The Muppets (2015) episode "Swine Song", Kermit says that stress over the future of the show has given him butterflies in his stomach ... then clarifies that when he's stressed he eats butterflies.

Theatre

• From the comedic short play "Henry VIII's Gender Reveal Party":
  Henry: Stop laughing! You know I overeat when I get anxious.

Video Games

• Implied in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. If CJ is fat, he'll receive an alternate phone call from Sweet (after "Drive-Thru"), or Big Smoke (should they fail "Running Dog"), where both will note on how CJ has let himself go, with implication that he had resorted to eating lots and lots of food in order to cope with the loss of Beverly (the Johnson brothers' and Kendl's mother).
• At the end of the beach trip in Mega Man Star Force 3, Geo has time to save only one of his friend's possessions from being lost. Since two of them belong to Sonia and Luna, the one whose item you didn't retrieve (or both if you picked Bud's) will indulge in this.
• In Oxygen Not Included, a Duplicant with the Binge Eater stress response will eat way more food than usual if their Stress levels get too high.
• Similarly, one of the minor mental breaks in Rimworld is a Food Binge, where the colonist will start grabbing meal after meal and gorging it one after the other, barely pausing between meals and doing nothing else, until they recover or go to sleep. Fairly brief, but when food is scarce...
• In Mario Strikers Battle League, if the opposing team scores a goal, Donkey Kong will angrily sit down and eat a banana, glaring and baring his teeth the whole time.
• Dark Souls II: A man was in love with Queen Mytha, who only had eyes for the Iron King. He started overeating to cope with the rejection, which eventually transformed him into the Hutt-like Covetous Demon.

Western Animation

• In Central Park, Season 1 "Rival Busker", because her family is part of The Mafiya, Anya is so nervous about marrying her fiance that she starts eating a lot before the wedding ceremony. Eventually, she took some meat from the hotel kitchen and runs away. Molly finds her and hides her in her hotel room where she eats all the snacks that Paige forbid Molly from eating.
• During an episode of Chowder, The Flibber-Flabber Diet, Truffles becomes depressed when she realizes she'd gained weight and tries to comfort himself with her two "friends" peanut and butter (literally sticks of butter dipped in peanut butter). The fact that such a habit only contributes to her weight gain isn't lost on her, and she swings back and forth between loving her snack and hating it... before swinging around and blaming Mung since he's the cook of the household.
• In an episode of Family Guy, Brian is depressed because he is alone on Valentine's Day, and begins to binge eat a box of chocolates. Unfortunately, he forgot that chocolate is toxic for dogs and ends up getting sick.
• Final Space: "The Notorious Mrs. Goodspeed" sees Gary's closest living friend Mooncake eat his sorrows from Gary leaving him for a heist with his mother. He starts with H.U.E.'s homemade pancakes before going on to eat up various inedible trinkets like a Dimensional Key and even Fox, one of his own teammates who decides to host an intervention for the poor guy. The result is Mooncake becoming a fat, bloated mess of a creature that eventually coughs up everything that went into his gullet once the rest of the Team Squad reassures him he's still loved and valued by those around him.
• In the first season of The Legend of Korra, after Bolin catches Korra, his crush, kissing Mako, his brother, he runs away crying, and is later found in a noodle restaurant, slurring and nearly comatose after stuffing his face for hours.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Inspiration Manifestation", Rarity engages in this after the puppet theater she creates is harshly criticized. She's later seen crying on her fainting couch, devouring an absurd amount of ice cream and chocolates.
  • Rarity does it again in "It Isn't the Mane Thing About You"; after her mane is ruined and she's forced to cancel a photoshoot, her friends find her sulking in her boutique with the lights off, surrounded by empty ice cream cartons.
• Ready Jet Go!: Sean eats when he's stressed. In "Whole Lotta Shakin'", he offhandedly comments that he wants to eat macaroni and clarifies that he eats a lot when he's nervous. And considering he's a Nervous Wreck all the time, this provides an explanation for his overweight figure.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "What Ever Happened to Spongebob", Gary binge eats the entire year supply of Snail Food that SpongeBob left him out of depression. So he can stop snapping at SpongeBob into leaving the house. Whether or not he knew about the note at the bottom of the bowl beforehand - which requested "whom it may concern" to refill Gary's bowl - it wound up helping Sandy and Patrick figure out what's going on when they investigate SpongeBob's disappearance.

---