How COVID-19 May Be A Blessing In Disguise For Your Food Struggles
Back in March, I touched on emotional eating during COVID-19. People were just getting used to their new normal - lockdown normal - and they were struggling. Many people entered what I call the “Anything Goes Mindset”. You know, the one where all your food/exercise routines - good and bad - go out the window. Where you find yourself eating at weird times, skipping meals because your schedule is non-existent, giving up on exercise all together and raiding the fridge for comfort food. I noticed this shift in many of my clients and at the same time saw an uptick in coaching requests.
"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations." – Charles Swindoll
Your relationship with food mirrors your relationship to life, and let’s face it, life at the time was strange and stressful. It’s only natural that people’s relationship to food and their bodies took a turn for the worse. At the time, I was worried that COVID-19 would have a detrimental effect on my client’s progress and wondered how they would cope. But I have since then realised that, in fact, this pandemic has been a serious blessing in disguise for many people. Why? Let me explain.
COVID-19 brought issues to the surface that would have otherwise remained unearthed
Before COVID-19 hit, did you think that you had your eating struggles ‘under control’? But then when the pandemic and self-isolation hit, you suddenly found yourself reverting back to unhealthy coping mechanisms? For so many of us, COVID-19 triggered anxieties and, consequently, a relapse into binging, food restriction, overexercising etc.
The reason why it's so easy to fall back on binge eating is that it's what a binge eater knows (read: it’s comforting) and has been doing for as long as she/he can remember. Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School Podcast describes the process with a beautiful crystal glass analogy. We are the glass, and our emotions cause vibration; to halt the vibration, we fill the glass with water. We do the same thing with our bodies; we fill ourselves with food to suppress uncomfortable sensations. We eat to the point where we are so focused on feeling uncomfortably full that we briefly forget about the anxieties and emotions that made us go to town on that box of cookies. In times of uncertainty like this, it can be comforting to focus on what you think you can control: food and your body. As a result, COVID-19 quickly renewed old food and body anxieties.
As a recovered bulimic myself, I can empathise with this experience. Whilst this pandemic experience has proven to me how far I’ve come in finding healthier coping mechanisms, I do notice that those old neural pathways are still there... grown over and less traveled, but still a tempting trail during stressful times.
I want to stop right here. This is a crucial moment in which we find ourselves at a crossroads: we can either go down Guilt & Shame Avenue or take a left on Boulevard of the Explorers. You could beat yourself up for experiencing a flare-up in disordered eating or body image thoughts and behaviours OR you could become inquisitive and see this as a deep healing opportunity. Undoubtedly, many of us chose the former at first.
But what I have noticed with my clients is that, whilst utterly frustrated with themselves for “taking two steps back” at first, many of them have managed to reframe the experience as a positive transformational opportunity. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s triggering a lot of unwanted behaviours and thoughts. BUT, it’s shining light on matters of our psyche that we otherwise wouldn’t have paid attention to.
As I said in my previous post, bingeing is not a sin. Quite contrarily, it’s an opportunity to explore why certain feelings make us so uncomfortable. If we allow it, it’s a chance to sit down with our emotions, take note, and understand what pushed us to stuff our faces in the first place. The beauty of being at home and, for the most part, isolated is that we have the TIME to finally check in with ourselves, be curious, and, most of all, be compassionate.
As one of my clients put it:
“I wouldn’t have been where I am today if it hadn’t been for COVID-19. Isolation allowed me to go all in and commit to myself 100%.. To bring all my issues to the surface. To give it the attention it needed.”
PS: this also applies to you if you previously didn't consider yourself as someone that struggled with food, but since coronavirus have found yourself struggling. If it hadn’t been for COVID-19, some other big life event would have perhaps triggered you. Isn’t it better to tackle this now instead of in a couple years down the right? I like to believe so.
You have more time for self care.
The beauty of being at home and, for the most part, isolated is that we have the TIME to finally check in with ourselves, be curious, and, most of all, be compassionate. If not now, when?! If you are still under lockdown or living in a country where restrictions are in place, I encourage you to use this time for increased self care. This is your time to be curious, to be gentle and kinder towards yourself. Consider this your practice run for when things go back to the normal hectic ways.
And the great thing is: the more we practice self care, the more it will become something that we intuitively do. When you actively listen to yourself, your kind nature (we are all fundamentally wired to be kind – if you want to explore more on this topic, I suggest you start by listening the ‘Human Kindness’ podcast episode with Deliciously Ella) will make you gravitate towards all those things that soothe you and bring you happiness. We all want to feel like we matter and are cared for, and it starts by caring for ourselves!
If this pandemic has given us one thing, it’s time. As Pericles said many moons ago, "time is the wisest counsellor of all.” Now, more than ever, we have the time to do all those things that bring us back to the present moment and show ourselves some much needed TLC. Examples are going for walks, taking a little extra time for our morning/night routine, baking a batch of blueberry muffins, meditating, and my personal favourite, journaling. My goal for you during this time is to build up your ‘Self Care Toolkit’ and find out what works for you! Listen to your inner voice, trust the process, and take one step at a time – it's about progress, not perfection (after all, is there even such a thing as perfection?). Remember, inner work creates an outer impact; taking the time for self-care will have a spillover effect on every area of your life.
By the way, it can really help to schedule these things into your calendar to a) give yourself a sense of routine/structure and b) to hold yourself accountable. It might sound over the top to put it in your calendar, but we often don't take self-care seriously enough, and we end up not taking the time for ourselves unless we have the right reminders in place. Trust me on this one, and you'll thank me later.
COVID-19 is teaching us to become flexible - an important aspect of your relationship to food
When the world around you goes into chaos, it can be tempting to tighten the control around what you eat and how much you exercise. It feels like it’s the one thing you have control over. I get it. Having structure feels like a safe-haven right now.
But food rules can also be detrimental in many ways. Can you think of ways in which your food inflexibility has been a hindrance in how you’re coping right now? How would things be different if you didn’t feel like you had to eat at certain times, had to exercise at certain times and could only eat certain meals and product brands? This black and white thinking (the opposite of flexible thinking) is something that pretty much everyone with disordered eating experiences. When life is ‘normal’, aka we’re not in a pandemic, it may have felt easier to stick to your rigid eating ways, because you had structure in your overall day-to-day. Now that that’s gone, you are desperately trying to hold on that last smidgen of structure in the form of food.
But can you perhaps use this time to practice flexibility? How might you work with rather than against the current circumstances and go with the flow? Could you take steps today to let go of some of your food rules? Life is ever-changing, and so are we. Circumstances change, and our responses adapt consequently. Life ebbs and flows and learning to be flexible can set us up for success, not just when it comes to food but in all areas of our lives.
For example, can you become OK with not eating during your usual mealtimes but instead pay careful attention to the bodily sensations that your recognise as hunger? To give you a concrete example: I usually have a decently large breakfast after my morning workout. But since COVID-19 happened, I haven’t really been exercising and have also been having later dinners. As a result, I am not really hungry in the mornings. Initially, I was really frustrated because the lack of appetite in the morning led me to eating at random times throughout the day without any sense of structure. I felt like it messed up my routine.
But then I realised that this is actually a chance for me to become hyper-aware of my hunger sensations. Rather than being annoyed with myself, I could see this as an opportunity to tune in to my bodily cues and eat according to my body’s signals. In ‘normal’ life (for lack of a better word), we often have to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at pre-determined times that don’t actually allow us to consider whether we’re actually hungry or not. So, in a ironic way, self-isolation is a chance for us to practice intuitive eating!
The same goes for exercise; use this time to get in touch with your body. You don’t have a gym membership that you’re obliged to use, instead you can wake up each morning and ask yourself “What does my body need right now?” If one morning you’re craving a restorative yoga session rather than a 5km run, then go ahead and take those 30 minutes to be gentler with your body; it will serve you in so many ways!
