Comfort Eating Derailed My Healthy Habits
5 strategies I used to ditch junk food and get back on track
Our downhill slide started with the Super Bowl.
Feeling festive, my husband and I took a detour from our healthy diet with a big tray of gooey, cheesy nachos. They offered some solace as my hometown team, the Kansas City Chiefs, floundered and ultimately lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 31–9.
That was just the start of one of the dreariest Februarys on record. As we trudged through the cold, snowy days, comfort food started looking mighty appealing.
Things we hadn’t bought in months wound up in our grocery cart. Chili cheese corn chips, frozen egg rolls, diet soda, and almond butter cups? Why not? Feeling too low to cook? Take-out pizza and burritos were a two-minute drive away.
By the end of the month, we both felt lousy. It wasn’t just the couple of pounds we picked up. We were puffy-faced, bloated, and beat.
We finally looked at each other and said, “Enough.” We knew what to do. We just had to overcome inertia to get back on track.
How the pandemic changed what we eat
Research shows that pandemic stress made “America’s already poor eating habits worse.”
