Bayside Dietetics
By Sarah Smith from Bayside Dietetics
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A friend of mine just said goodbye to all his employees while another friend sits and waits for the travel industry to resurrect before he can be paid again. There’s a girlfriend who is terrified of the virus, and another who is relishing this time alone with her child.
We are all sitting somewhere on the spectrum of totally new situations and thus having totally different emotions.
If you sit back and think about how you are managing, I bet there are areas in which you are coping well. Have you accessed a whole lot of new websites and resources on kid’s entertainment? Are you finding new cupboards to clean at home?!
Now think about how different the Coronavirus has made your situation with food. How many different things are there for you to manage around food right now? For the first time in a long time, many people are simply managing how to get enough to eat. It might be a change in food supply or a change in income that is putting food at risk.
For others, it may be about a whole new range of emotions that seem unrelated to food and yet they seem to pop up and have a huge effect on the way you are eating. For many people, the reassurance and comfort they need at this time will come from food. Food is helpful in that way. It triggers the “happy” part of our brain and can help us get a brief break from our worries.
There is immense guilt that can come from eating for comfort and pleasure. The level of guilt can be out of perspective – perhaps comparable to the guilt felt for forgetting to pick up a child from sports practise (remember that thing called an after school activity?!). The flow-on effect of feeling guilty around food can be huge. For some it may lead to getting totally out of whack with eating while others have a more devastating impact on feelings of self-worth.
Perhaps now is the very best time to call a truce and stop the battle around food. Learn to be gentle with yourself about how you use food to cope. After all, it was probably one of the first ways you ever learnt to get comfort. Most babies are offered a feed at the first sign of distress and our relationship between food and comfort grows from there.
I discussed this with a client last week and she said it would be the most amazing thing if she could let go of the food battle, but she wondered if giving herself permission to eat would cause her to overeat. Yet in her experience, overeating actually happened when she did the opposite and became highly critical around food.
In reality, making peace with food may give you a pleasant surprise and allow you to see food for what it is – food. From there you might find you can treat it with neutral respect.
It is not the time to be getting food “right”. For now, providing yourself and your family with food is enough. Don’t be tempted to make your food clean, balanced, nutritious, colourful, gourmet, carb-free, meat-free and dairy-free. It’s about eating food. Simple as that.
Hoping you are all staying safe.
Sarah
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