There is a version of us that buys vegetables on Monday morning, cooks ahead and sincerely believes that this week will be different. And there is the same person on Thursday at nine in the evening, after a day that ran three hours longer than it should have, standing in front of the fridge negotiating with a piece of cake.
Wellness culture has long enjoyed presenting food choices as a character test. If we choose the salad, we are disciplined. If we want something sweet, we have given in. That logic is simple, tidy and extremely useful for an industry that then sells us yet another method of appetite control.
Human behaviour is less orderly.
Stress genuinely can change the way we eat — but there is no single universal reaction. A large meta-analysis covering 54 studies and nearly 120,000 adults found a small but measurable link between stress and increased overall food intake. Stress was, on average, also associated with somewhat higher consumption of what the authors classified as less healthy food, and somewhat lower intake of healthier food. At the same time, variation between individuals was large.
In other words, stress does not turn everyone into someone reaching for chocolate. Some people lose their appetite. Some eat more. Some do not change quantity but change their choices. More recent systematic reviews of experimental studies describe multiple distinct response patterns for precisely this reason, emphasising the roles of emotional eating, chronic stress, individual reactivity and context.
That is less satisfying than the formula "cortisol drives you to sugar" — but it is far closer to real life.
Cortisol is part of the stress response, but a person is not a pipe in which one hormone at the top automatically dispenses a doughnut at the bottom. Food choices are shaped by hunger, habit, availability, prior restriction, sleep, mood, the reward we anticipate from eating, and the simple fact that we associate certain flavours with pleasure. If we have been under pressure all day, it is not strange that by evening we are not dreaming of steamed broccoli.
Food rich in sugar and fat can be intensely pleasurable, energy-dense and tied to the experience of reward. This is not a character flaw. Our brains evolved in a world where cheesecake was not waiting on every corner, available with a single tap on a phone. The modern environment is simply exceptionally good at making food we naturally find appealing constantly available.
Here stress meets another modern phenomenon: restriction.
If we ate too little during the day because we were busy, skipped lunch, tried to be "good", or saved calories for later, the evening desire for food need not be any kind of emotional mystery. We may simply be hungry. A systematic review of studies tracking food cravings in daily life finds a fairly consistent link between current hunger and the desire to eat, while the link with stress and negative mood is far more variable.
That is an important distinction. Sometimes we crave something sweet after a bad day because the day was bad. Sometimes because we had coffee for lunch.
The problem arises when the response is punishment. We eat the dessert, declare the day lost, restrict more strictly tomorrow, find ourselves hungry again in the evening, and then interpret the whole cycle as proof of a lack of discipline. In reality, we may have built a system in which the body is simply and persistently asking for energy.
This does not mean every craving should automatically be followed, or that emotional eating can never become a problem. If food becomes the primary or only means of regulating emotions, and this causes genuine distress, the conversation is more serious than a single piece of cake. But an everyday desire for something sweet after a hard day is not, in itself, a diagnosis.
It may be more useful to ask a few tedious questions before searching for a new hack. Did we actually eat today? Did we sleep enough? Are we hungry, or do we simply want a moment of pleasure? And if we want a moment of pleasure, why is that automatically a problem?
Dessert has a peculiar status in contemporary eating. We have loved it enough to make it for centuries, yet in recent decades we have developed an entire vocabulary of apology for eating it: cheat meal, guilty pleasure, we earned it, we will burn it off tomorrow. As though tiramisu must pass an ethics committee before it reaches the table.
At VERA, what interests us more is the idea that dessert can simply be dessert. Some of our sweet items are made without added refined sugar, and we think carefully about ingredients — but this does not mean we are trying to remove pleasure from the equation. If we are eating a cake, it should taste like something we wanted to eat, not like a punishment for wanting cake.
The same applies to a bad day. It is not necessary to resolve stress with food every time — but it is equally unnecessary to turn every craving for something sweet into a psychological failure. Sometimes the more useful thing is to change what happened before nine in the evening: to eat a proper lunch, to sleep, to take a break, not to spend eight hours running on coffee and adrenaline.
And sometimes the day was simply terrible, and a piece of good cake is a fine way to end it.
It will not solve the problem that made the day bad. But neither would a salad.
Try it at VERA — specialty café and wellness bistro, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Comfort food at VERA →