Pandemic Food, Eating and Weight Struggles: Using Mindful Movement to Self-Soothe

Whether you feel too frantic to eat sometimes or your pantry beckons you to snack five minutes after having lunch, emotional eating or struggling with food is a common coping mechanism during stressful times. Pandemic living requires most of us to stay home with more limitations, stressors and grief than we have ever experienced. 

You tell yourself: You need to nourish your body with quality fuel and regular movement. That can be a tall order if you’re riddled with spells of anxiety or depression.

Perhaps it’s tempting to invest in a rigid program that the January Diet Culture promises will solve all your problems. But, take it from someone who waved farewell to the Diet Train a long time ago: Pausing to understand your push-pull relationship with food is a more peaceful and promising approach.

Food as Pleasure and Food as a Pause

Food should be a pleasurable part of life that gives you a little spark in your step or kisses an emotional boo-boo from time to time. But when the focus on food drives life, and when feelings are chronically bypassed by stuffing or starving to manage the waves of life, that’s when it’s important to get curious about what’s happening.

Channel Your Inner Mother for Emotional Regulation

When we are little—from the womb throughout our childhood—we ideally develop a relationship with a primary caregiver who can attune to our needs. When we cry out or reach for something, that caregiver attends to our requests with a predictable sense of empathy and emotional effort. 

This co-regulation—from caregiver to child—helps to provide an internal foundation for the child. This energetic "dance" creates an imprint on the nervous system suggesting that the world is generally safe despite some inevitable bumps and bruises.

This primary caregiver models how to soothe—genuinely acknowledging the array of feelings one experiences from infancy through adolescence. When we grow up and can self-soothe, it means we have had the opportunity to internalize this nurturing primary relationship. 

Self-soothing is necessary to learn, integrate and practice:

· Whether this “Good Enough Mother” provided this foundation or not. 

· Whether acute or chronic traumas like a pandemic affect development or lifestyle.

But I know what you’re thinking: How can I self-soothe when I feel a general funk of Covid-induced irritation and angst or like I’m moving through mud? This is where building awareness of nervous system science can provide somewhat of a guide of how to self-soothe in satisfying, embodied ways.

Your Nervous System in a Nutshell

When we feel overwhelmed or threatened, instead of thinking through creative problem solving in a chill way, our autonomic nervous system senses the threat and either signals us to fight/flee or freeze. Not limited to a flush of heat and irritability or high anxiety, this is your Fight/Flight response. Not limited to feeling foggy, glazed over or checked out, this is your freeze response—a form of Shut-down. Dealing with pandemic pressures, it’s not uncommon to bounce back and forth between the two.

Sometimes this feels like your gut recoiling from food or it feels like all you wanna do is grab more and more food. Both have a quality of being disconnected from your biological hunger and other bodily rhythms. 

The deprivation-binge cycle might be the next war you wage. That is yet another cycle of reaching for something unsustainable–committing to yet another restrictive diet to soothe deeper hungers that feel insatiable–resulting in the inevitable binge. The angst and fog return as both a blessing and a curse.

However, it is possible to shift into that more ideal regulated state where you can reconnect with hunger/fullness signals and shift back into living and relating in more fulfilling, conscious ways.

Self-Soothing: Using Mindful Movement Practices – For All Bodies

As mentioned earlier, when the autonomic nervous system senses threat, it automatically responds the way all animal bodies do for protection. When we can slowly learn new ways to invite our body, mind and spirit into an environment of welcoming and witnessing, we can integrate the kind of self-support that helps us be more present and more embodied. 

Finding new ways of embodying helps us integrate new verbal messages—"I am defective" can change into "I have the ability to manage many varied situations." Combining attachment concepts with a trauma-informed, invitational approach, M-Bodied practices offer body-based developmental redos for self-soothing and deep nourishment.

M-Bodied explores postures, shapes and movements key in developmental parent/child dances to help offer a new experience of being deeply nourished within a supportive container. Some of these postures, shapes and movements might look and feel familiar—like yoga postures. However, M-Bodied, a Chi for Two® practice, consciously invites awareness of these postures, shapes and movements as mothering medicine. Chi for Two® practices offer the path to becoming M-Bodied.

Some wonder if M-Bodied practices are accessible for all bodies, and the answer is yes. M-Bodied can be practiced in a chair, on the floor, or in the comfort of your bed. You can use your senses, your eyes, your limbs or your whole body to experience all the practices. Check out the details below for the next series.

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Feeling stuck with your relationship to food and your body? Caroline Gebhardt, APC, RYT, is a psychotherapist and yoga teacher who helps people to reconnect with their body-mind-spirit from a non-diet approach. Check out this upcoming virtual mindful movement series where you will learn somatic and cognitive therapeutic skills to come home to your body.

 M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine:

Attachment-based, trauma-sensitive and polyvagal-informed practices to help deeply nourish your relationship with food and your body.

This 6-week virtual series begins Tuesday, February 16, 7pm-8pm.

 ⭐️ Bite into your deeper hungers and increase interoceptive / proprioceptive awareness by using sensory-based art and journaling

⭐️ Learn to access basic developmental movement patterns and shapes and how they can help support and integrate emotional regulation for all bodies

⭐️ Practice self-soothing and learn how to mindfully mobilize places where you feel stuck by using attachment-based techniques and awareness in relationship to gravity, breath and Mother Earth

Adults and teens welcome. $150/series

Contact Caroline@Mbodiedtherapy.com or 404-210-6752