It’s okay to gain weight right now

It’s okay to gain weight right now, smack dab in the middle of a global crisis.

There’s no shame in eating your feelings when you have no idea what’s going on. You are not any less of a person for indulging more than you normally would. Eating is weird and complicated at the best of times, especially for feminine-identifying people. When you’re isolated from your social circles, even your family, for the foreseeable future, your relationship with food is bound to change. Embrace it. Notice it. Treat yourself as best you can, but don’t stress if you don’t. Eating five brownies or a whole pot of macaroni and cheese is better than eating nothing.

And if your consumption varies day to day, that’s cool too. Some days you’ll eat more, while other days you’ll eat less. All of our routines are disrupted right now, even if you’re still going into work as an essential worker (eliminated/truncated breaks, more hours than usual). If you’re not isolated in your home with no structure, you may be eating at weird hours of the day in different-than-normal portions due to altered structure of your now hectic work day. Exhausted from work, you might reach for a food that takes one minute to make instead of thirty. That’s fine. Feed yourself.

What we need now is a nourished nation, not a nation that’s nitpicking over the food choices of others. The more fed we are, the stronger we are, and the better our chances of fighting the virus are. It costs zero dollars to not pay attention to the food choices of others. We have enough to worry about without piling shame and blame onto the plate.

It’s okay to gain weight during a fucking pandemic, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.