my pandemic body-how Covid-related anxiety, social isolation and restrictions have redefined my relationship with food and my body.

Food has always been one of my main pleasures in life. It is something that is inextricably tied to happy memories for me: going to restaurants and overindulging with friends, ordering Friday night takeaways and having frenzied drunken feasts after a night out, bellies aching from laughter. Yet in the first lockdown in 2020, something shifted. If food is something that in my mind is inherently social, the pandemic changed the way I perceived it completely. As the pandemic grew worse, the paranoia that characterised isolation and general life in 2020 clung onto my relationship with food, as something that once made me happy was infected with this overwhelming sense of fear. Removed from my ordinary life in Edinburgh and separated from my friends, I began feeling alienated from my body, and through proxy the food that nourished and fuelled it.

This isn’t a unique lockdown experience, as it turns out. Body image issues have become endemic across the UK in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because isolation has created the perfect conditions for disordered eating. The combination of social isolation with heightened feelings of anxiety and stress, which we have all experienced in lockdown, has created a breeding ground for unhealthy attitudes to food and one’s body to emerge. A Guardian article, published earlier this year, highlighted the rise in eating disorders during lockdown, quoting Dr Lorna Richards who states, “Eating disorders have thrived in this environment, as the focus on eating and weight control becomes a way of coping.” Richards discusses how imposing restrictions on food can become for many a means of providing “a sense of control or mastery”, particularly during a period of instability. I am definitely among those who have resorted to imposing a sense of discipline upon their body and diet as a coping mechanism during the pandemic, despite previously having a healthy relationship with food.

While being removed from the gaze of other people, it was my own scrutiny of my body that proved so harmful to my self-image. Whereas I’d never really struggled with body issues before – only really experiencing the odd day of feeling crap – in lockdown, everything changed. Over this period of seclusion, my body grew more and more foreign to me; it came to represent something I grew suspicious of. Each tickly throat, bout of feeling sick, or headache, made me more alert to the fact that I was utterly helpless in the face of the virus overwhelming the globe. I stopped seeing my body as something that supports me and enables me to live my life, and became alienated from my own reflection. Loving your body is even harder when you’re scared that at any minute it might betray you. I think now that this feeling of not being in control of my own health, alongside being separated from all of my best friends, catalysed this shift in my attitude towards my body.

While I can’t control the effect the virus will have on my body, I can control the size my body grows to or shrinks to; I can exert a kind of power over my body that I cannot wield against Covid-19. In a way, it became a game of imposing discipline over my body, of implementing a sense of regime amidst an environment that was marked by its very absence of order, as the pandemic continued to wreak havoc on a global scale. I started obsessively exercising everyday and if I missed a workout, I would feel guilty and wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else – only thinking about how lazy I was for giving my body a rest. I also watched ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos – trends that saturate Youtube and Instagram – and I’d compare the meals I was eating to whatever these girls were having. Social media played a toxic, complicit role in these unhealthy behaviours. With limited access to actual people, I spent more and more time dwelling on images on Instagram that I would otherwise never have even wasted my time looking at. Not being around people, and not moving along the usual trajectory of my life, made me question what I was supposed to look like. I began to think the world outside my household was embodied in these beautiful women on Instagram whom I couldn’t help comparing myself to. I started to view my body in the mirror through a distorted lense, clinically scrutinising my reflection and picking out flaws as though my body was not actually me, but something completely detached from myself.

Now, out of isolation, I’m still struggling with this toxic relationship to food. I’m obsessive with exercise still; if I don’t exercise, I feel guilty and it affects my mood for the rest of the day. Certain foods still make me feel crap after eating them, including food that represented the ultimate treat before the Covid-19 outbreak. I’m learning to check this behaviour, though, before it grows into something more sinister. I love food and I never want to cease loving it – to fear food would make my life so bloody miserable.

I’ve learnt that social isolation and disordered eating are intertwined. I can recognise the desire in myself to stay inside, to distance myself from others because I know by myself, I can control what I’m doing. It’s hard getting used to socialising again and I want some of my old self back, the girl who boasted about her appetite and never steered clear of a certain drink because of its calories. Little by little, I’m getting back to that healthy relationship and talking about it is crucial. The book I’m reading at the moment, Supper Club, by Lara Williams, is all about the celebration of food and women with great appetites, and it is a total fuck-you to diet culture and to a society that perpetuates the idea that women should take up as little space as possible. Each chapter makes me drool with its visceral descriptions of food. It has introduced me to my new favourite dish, Spaghetti Puttanesca, which Nigella Lawson, to my absolute delight, calls Slut’s Spaghetti. William’s novel is riotous, joyous and emotional and it is just what I needed.

Crucially, we need to question why anxiety engenders this desire for thinness and why weight loss is accepted as positive regardless of its cause. When I started losing weight, it wasn’t seen as a cause for concern, but something that was admirable. Despite being caused primarily by mental health issues, it was seen as positive. This glorification of weight loss regardless of its catalyst was reflected in the body-focused rhetoric in the media messaging we were all exposed to during lockdown, which emphasised the dangers of acquiring ‘lockdown bodies’. This messaging presented lockdown as the ideal opportunity for people to lose weight and to come out of isolation thinner than when they’d gone in, instead of prioritising the mental health of the population during an incredibly stressful and tumultuous time. This muddling of priorities is testament to the fatphobia ingrained within our society as well as the government’s devaluation of mental health.

Ultimately, the connection between lockdown, loneliness and disordered eating has barely been spoken about. Body insecurity was a side effect of isolation I did not pre-empt, nor was it something I could check on the NHS website, but it lingers with me still. I can’t stress enough how crucial it is that we open up to our friends and family about the mental health struggles we have all battled following the Covid-19 outbreak. Despite lockdown being over, we’re all individually still living with the effects of isolation, and so it is vital that we encourage open dialogue about the effects it has had upon our mental health. Regardless of how lonely you might feel dealing with these issues, there are so many of us who feel the same way, and you are not alone. Let’s talk.  

Issy is an English Literature graduate and writer living in Edinburgh. You can find her talking about books on her instagram @books.that.bang and booksthatbang1.wordpress.com