The Impact of Covid on Eating Disorders

After a challenging two years, we have somehow got to the other side of Covid, with many of us feeling frazzled, tired, and unsure how to come to terms with what just happened.

*

*

*

During this time of isolation, fear, separation, and change, there has been a dramatic rise in eating disorders. Eating disorders are strategies that individuals “pick up” during times of stress or trauma, that place sharp attention on food and the body, as ways to try cover up feelings of disconnection, insecurity, and pain.

A 2020 study mentioned that the COVID‐19 pandemic has created a global context that has led to an increase eating disorder risk and symptoms, decrease factors that protect against eating disorders, and exacerbate barriers to care.

For many people, the disruptions to daily routines and constraints to outdoor activities increased weight and shape concerns, whilst being so homebound negatively impacted eating, exercise, and sleeping patterns, all which increase the risk for eating disorders.

The absence of clear routines and markers of time and space - like mealtimes, or distinctions between home and work areas, or the dissolving of structures that were supporting eating plans - increase the risk for eating disorder behaviours.

In addition, the restrictions around activities like grocery shopping or eating out at restaurants, combined with perceptions of scarcity of certain food products, heighten attentional focus on food which could increase the likelihood of binge eating. Obsessive healthy eating is also a consequence of the pandemic whereby eating for one’s immunity and one’s health result in restriction.

Furthermore, the social restrictions have deprived many individuals of the social support and adaptive and protective coping strategies. These difficulties in access to care may exacerbate existing health inequities, and negatively affect those for whom the pandemic has reduced financial resources.

And of course, the increase in eating disorder‐specific or anxiety‐provoking social media and the reliance on video conferencing can negatively impact body image and other eating disorder symptoms.

How has Covid impacted eating disorder tendencies in your life?

Despite many parts of the world starting to open up again, why are eating disorders still so prevalent?

The ripples and the aftermath of Covid are still living within our nervous systems. The somatic experience is still fear, uncertainty, and mistrust because there haven’t been enough spaces for individuals to process and release the experience.

When the body is still locked in the stress of the experience, the eating disorder strategies that came in to protect during that time continue playing out because the body has not fully registered that it is safe.

This is why eating disorders continue to persist even when things have “opened up".

Things have not truly opened up. Collectively, what have we done to make sense of the pandemic and the imprints that it has left on our psyches and within our human history?

When things open up without proper acknowledgement or intention, the body and brain do not fully recongise that things have shifted or change, and will continue clinging onto the strategies that brought protection during the times of stress and fear.

Luckily, this points to where support and help can come in: creating safe, intentional places with the support of a loving presence for the fear to be acknowledged and ultimately moved through.

This is a process that takes two (or more) individuals coming together. Unlike during the pandemic’s signature of social isolation, the antidote to an eating disorder is social connection and co-regulation. This points to the power of group therapy, where people can come together to share stories and to remember they are not alone.

When people can come together to create an intentional and integrated healing space, the body can register the safety, and can begin to acknowledge the period of stress is over, and can start to trust again. Over time, trust with one’s own body emerges once again, as well as greater emotional resilience, and connection with the wider world

This process does take practice and time. It takes practice to learn and remember adaptive coping strategies. It takes time to comprehend, grieve, acknowledge, and grow from all the things that happened since 2020.

Things then start to open up from the inside out.

In that spaciousness, there is a chance to breathe again and live freely and from a place of inner harmony.

By restoring safety and trust with our own bodies and with the world, we can collectively and individually recover, heal, and transform.

Photo by Soragrit Wongsa on Unsplash