Pandemic Eating: What Can We Learn?

How did your eating habits change during the pandemic? Did you eat more, eat less, more frequently, less frequently, more take out, more cooking at home? Did you become a sourdough bread baker? Did nothing change at all?

I’ve heard every possible mix of these from the people I’ve been informally polling over the last few “post” pandemic months. Of course we won’t know what really happened, on a macro scale, until someone does the research (p.s., if you’re a science-y person, please do this research!)

The broad cultural narrative that’s formed, so far, is that “everyone gained weight” during these last two years spent mostly at home. Everyone also stopped wearing nice clothes (at least from the waist down), stopped exercising, and generally stopped caring about their appearance. 

To some - likely a pretty privileged sub-group of people - it sounds like the pandemic was deeply liberating: consistent freedom from the public gaze helped people to examine how much they do or don’t care about what others see when they look at them. They discovered the pleasure of things like soft, comfy “lounge wear”. Wireless and pull-over bra sales increased 14% and 31% respectively (source: NY Times, March 18th 2021).

And for so many others the pandemic was a deeply traumatic life-and-death crisis. Lost jobs, lost homes, illness, and shocking deaths without hugs good-bye or group grieving rituals. 

So, what really happens to human beings’ eating habits when we are faced with stress? 

There are really only two known responses to stress and trauma when it comes to food: not eating, or eating more. 

Let’s start with “not eating”. If a body is generally well fed and cared for, and never faces food restriction or scarcity, the typical response to big, stressful events is to lose your appetite. If you are facing a major threat your brain will move into fight or flight mode to cope. When your body goes into threat-response mode, all of your body’s energy goes into scanning the environment and upping your reactivity to stressors (lots of blood pumping quickly to muscles so you can flee, for example). Adrenalin increases. It’s very hard to sleep. You get the idea. For a ‘normal eater’ this results in a reduced or non-existent appetite because the body needs to do more important things for you right now. 

But for people who live under constant food deprivation by choice (not due to actual food access issues, like deep poverty), stress will redirect all the mental energy it takes to restrict foods to other more important tasks, like protecting you from a deadly virus. Stress basically removes your willpower, and without it, you will find yourself eating a lot more than you usually do. 

This need to eat more was always there, underneath the work you were doing to restrict. It’s your body’s natural compensatory instinct - it wants you to eat as much food as you want and need. When your body thinks you are in “scarcity mode” (a state that is induced by any kind of persistent restriction - even just categorizing foods as “good” or “bad”) it will try hard to push you to eat more to protect you from potential weight loss and starvation. Consistently overriding your natural appetite is a very high level brain activity that only works for so long (this is why diets fail 98% of the time). Our evolutionary drives - eating, breathing, drinking water - always win out. So when stressful situations arise, higher-level willpower related brain activity stops completely in favor of life-saving physiological responses. 

So if you’re asking yourself “why did I gain weight during the Pandemic”, wonder no more.

But if you’re really interested in exploring liberation in the wake of the pandemic experience, maybe you should be wondering: “Why did I restrict my eating for so long in the first place?”

If you’re unhappy with your pandemic weight gain, know that your body is going to fight to get you to the right weight range for you. As life returns to normal, you’ll move more, you’ll feel comfortable hitting the grocery store more often, and most likely your body will naturally go back to whatever it was before - without imposing any food restrictions at all. We all have a natural, genetically predetermined weight set-point range (10-20 lbs up or down), and our bodies will naturally fluctuate within that range. Many of us lose weight in the summer and gain weight in the winter, for example, due to small changes in diet and movement levels. Consider the pandemic your two-year-long winter. 

But maybe it is the perfect time to take a very long, loving look at your post-pandemic body and ask yourself: what if I could just accept this body as it is? What if I could just buy clothes for this body that fit? Now that I’ve done it for two years, maybe I could continue to eat whatever I want for the rest of my life. What might that be like? 

Weight set-point theory often focuses on the fact that it’s nearly impossible to maintain weight loss below the bottom of your set-point range (it explains the 98% diet failure rate). However, it’s also very hard to gain weight above your natural set-point. The only known way to do that is to lose a lot of weight and regain it. When you regain lost weight your body will add a few pounds to your upper set-point weight to protect you from future starvation (permanently increasing your personal set-point range). So, in reality, you really can eat whatever you want, whenever you want, and your body will fight hard to keep you within your natural weight range. 

I personally tested this “upper limit” theory out when I was first healing from lifelong dieting and restriction over five years ago. I ate a pint of ice cream almost daily for a year. I’m not sure how much weight I gained, but it couldn’t have been more than ten pounds because all of my clothes continued to fit fine. My body leveled off and in years two and three my interest in ice cream waned a bit (I’d re-programmed myself to see ice cream in a more neutral way after a year of giving myself total permission to eat it whenever I wanted). 

Now that you’ve had a taste of food freedom during the pandemic, I highly recommend you KEEP GOING. It’s blissful on the other side, and I’m here to support you through the process.