Pandemic Eating

2020 has been a truly crazy year. Nearly everyone reading this spent at least part of their year experiencing government-mandated "lockdowns." In the UK, at its strictest point, this meant everything being closed or moved online except very essential services, and not even being allowed outside for more than an hour a day.

That is a lot of time to be left in your house with a mega-ton of cookies. I love cookies. My mouth salivates at the thought of them. Seems they make my mind wander off-topic as well. Re-focus, self! (Is Cookie Monster my spirit animal, err, spirit puppet?)

Recent research by psychologists at De Montfort University (UK) and the University of Lincoln (UK) measured British people's eating behaviour during lockdown. They asked people a bunch of questions related to how much they are eating, what they are eating, and their weight. They also assessed coping styles.

The researchers split these items into two broad subscales, with one assessing adaptive coping and one assessing maladaptive coping. The adaptive coping measures assessed variables such as positive reframing ("I've been looking for something good in what is happening") and planning ("I have been trying to come up with a strategy about what to do"). The maladaptive measures assessed self-blame ("I have been criticizing myself") and denial ("I have been refusing to believe that it has happened").

They found that people who had a high BMI (body mass index; roughly mass factoring in height) going into the study ate more during lockdown than before the lockdown, but this wasn't the case for people with all other ranges of BMI.

Most interestingly, this was found especially among high BMI individuals who had a lot of self-blame and denial. That is, high BMI individuals did not eat more during lockdown than before if they used positive reframing and planning.

One caveat is that the results outlined above appear to be specific to eating to cope with negative emotions (boredom, sadness, etc).

This suggests that people with high BMI might be especially prone to increased eating when experiencing lockdowns, but only if they have non-adaptive coping strategies. Future research could then test if using these more positive approaches to thinking can be taught, and as such, result in more healthy eating during lockdown for these individuals.

Bad time to say I want to get back to my cookies? I guess that hinges on my BMI!

Happy holidays!

A link to the research article is not yet available as it is in press.