Back in his mogul days, Donald Trump was hawking stuffed-crust pizza and the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. Now his relentlessly chaotic presidency has Americans eating in a whole new way: We are officially in the era of the “Trump 10.”
As 30 Rock actress Jane Krakowski told Stephen Colbert: “Now that I’ve put on my Trump 10, I’ve got to work out a little.” It’s “like the freshman 15,” she explained, referring to the 15 pounds that college students are purported to gain their first year on campus. (Studies indicate it’s more like 3 pounds.)
Krakowski isn’t the only one experiencing Trump-induced waist expansion: Director Judd Apatow said he’s just hoping his stress eating doesn’t turn into 30 pounds, and Barbara Streisand has tweeted about how Trump has made her gain weight.
“The so-called Trump 10 could indeed be real,” says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, an Ohio State University psychiatrist who studies stress and eating.
The reasoning is simple enough: “When people are stressed, they typically do reach for the higher-calorie, higher-sugar foods that are more likely to put on pounds,” she tells NPR.
Right in line with that, recent American Psychological Association surveys indicate that people is the US are more stressed than they’ve been in a decade, with 59 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats reporting that the future of the country is a significant source of worry. And that was back in January — things have only gotten more wild since then, all the way up to bars opening early Thursday morning to welcome patrons to watch former FBI director James Comey’s testimony.
Like Jeb Bush said when he was campaigning against him, Trump “is a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.” When your life feels unstable, your brain wants comfort. Like Thrive Global reported before, if Trump is driving you crazy, you’re going to be driven to make the rest of your life feel extra sane. For a lot of us, you do that mouth first.
Originally published at medium.com