Life & Style

Comfort eating your way through the pandemic? You’re not alone

At a time of huge uncertainty and anxiety, we’ve gone full Christmas round here

There’s a long-held belief that people who eat to regulate their emotions are weak-willed or greedy but science says differently. Photograph: iStock

Tanya Sweeney
Sat Jun 6 2020 - 06:00

“Hanging in there.”

“Ah sure you know yourself. Groundhog Day.”

“Good days and bad.”

Ask someone how they are these days, and this is what you’ll hear. Yet one man I interviewed broke with protocol recently. “Jaysus. Eating all around me,” he admitted, almost embarrassed.

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I don’t know why, but it was nice to hear. I guess I’d always thought of comfort eating as something of a female phenomenon (studies do show that it’s more common among women than men). And yet we all seem to be at it these days. With very good reason, too. Stress is a big trigger for emotional eating, as are fluctuations in hormones. Boredom and habit all play their part, too.

There should be a single word for the emotions you feel when you reach into a biscuit packet and realise you’ve already snaffled the last one. Without you even noticing, what started out as ‘Just the one’ becomes ‘Where’d they go?’ It’s a weird combination; being jumpy with sugar, a bit sickly, and yet somehow not feeling quite sated. But I suppose that’s stress, anxiety or plain emotional restlessness for you.

Why does it feel like self-care when, intellectually, we know it's anything but?

Even as I write this, I’m a touch queasy from a post-breakfast Rolo/Toffee Crisp medley. “Made for sharing” bags? Aye, right. And yet, I’ve written about health and wellbeing for close to 15 years. I know full well that this is not a regime that healthcare professionals are going to recommend in a hurry.

So why do we do it? Why does it feel like self-care when, intellectually, we know it’s anything but?

Comfort or emotional eating, giving into temptation, treating oneself: they’re all sides of the same greasy coin.

Addiction of choice

In her book How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran summed up emotional eating perfectly: “By choosing food as your drug – sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs – you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, stop in on your parents and then stay up all night with an ill 5-year-old – something that is not an option if you’re regularly knocking back quarts of Scotch.

“It’s a way of screwing yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren’t indulging in the ‘luxury’ of their addiction, making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And that is why it’s so often a woman’s addiction of choice.”

You can probably see why baking is happening with such ferocious zeal, as if we've just discovered it

This makes perfect sense to me. With our energies and attentions trained towards the domestic, we are thinking of food more than ever. It’s taken the place of so many things in our lives: socialising, leisure time, celebrations. Eating healthily, which has long been part and parcel of being a functional adult, just feels like another thing on an endless to-do list.

And in need of an emotional salve, most of us find ourselves at the same crossroads. We can drink ourselves into comfortable numbness, but hangovers are just not an option in a day when you are attempting to be parent, teacher and employee all at once. You can probably see why baking is happening with such ferocious zeal, as if we’ve just discovered it.

Most of the foods that make us feel psychologically secure are the high-sugar, high-fat snack foods that we often wanted (and rarely got) in childhood.

Siren song

There’s a long-held belief that people who eat to regulate their emotions are weak-willed or greedy. Science says differently.

When the body is in a stressed state, the adrenal glands release cortisol, which increases appetite. Calorific, carb-heavy or sugar-filled foods create an effect that dampens these stress-related responses. The body is working overtime to process a heavy consignment of calories, but we mistake this lethargy for relaxation.

Add in the dopamine high that many sugary foods deliver, not to mention the misleading sense of feeling full or “whole” again, and fair play if you can resist that particular siren song.

We are carrying on in my house like we're on an extended, all-inclusive cruise

The thing is, now isn’t quite the time to worry about whether internalising your feelings with the help of Twixes is “good” or “bad”. We can pick back up with that debate later, when we all have a little more bandwidth to spare. In fact, I’ve decided to fully lean in to the idea of Monster Munch for dinner, or trifle as a decent accompaniment to Netflix.

At a time of huge uncertainty and anxiety, we’ve gone full Christmas round here. Not that it feels like anyone’s idea of a holiday, but we are carrying on in my house like we’re on an extended, all-inclusive cruise. And that’s fine. We need to take our comforts – our salty, processed, sticky comforts – where we can get them.

I know there will be a moment of debarkation. We will arrive to shore, and we can get back to the business of not giving in to the calming power of pastry. It’s a moment I’m happy to worry about later.

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