Don‘t be ashamed of those extra pounds

With the explosion of lockdown-friendly home exercise programs and advice, it may seem as if it’s never been easier to workout at home. But the reality is, it’s probably never been harder. For every person posting a sweaty “crushed it” selfie on Instagram, there’s another one (or four) just trying to endure pandemic-induced stress. Add in constant access to the refrigerator and a pantry overstocked with panic buys, and the guilt about what we’ve eaten — or the exercise we haven’t done — piles on faster than you can say “Quarantine 15.”

“So you’ve gained weight,” said Elyse Resch, a nutrition therapist. “So what? You’re alive. We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have.” (Not to mention many others straining under severe challenges, like significant health concerns and financial worries.)

You, too, can shrug off minor or moderate weight gain or the loss of your pre-pandemic fitness level. Read on. Break the cycle.

Above all, have compassion. “I don’t think most people change their minds by being yelled at or punched in the face, but that’s how we talk to ourselves,” said Phoenix Jackson, a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma. When Jackson is having trouble speaking to herself as kindly as she might a beloved friend, she likes to find a photo of herself as a child and think of how gently she’d like that person to be spoken to.

Next, recognize that weight and ambitious exercise regimens may offer the illusion of control in a world that seems out of control, but the anxiety they produce is not helpful. This is part of a larger problem: Most of us feel pressure to achieve or maintain a certain body size because we’ve been taught that it’s important. Excess weight has been linked to considerable health risks, though it does not, by definition, mean a person is unhealthy. Unfortunately, fatphobia promotes just the opposite: Fat people are denied health care, earn less money at work and have a harder time finding work in the first place, research has shown.

“Break the cycle by asking yourself where you learned that weight gain was something to be ashamed of,” Paula Freedman, a clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders, wrote in an email. Ask: Does this belief help me be the type of person I want to be? (Freedman added that you may have to break this down further: What type of person do I want to be? How do I want to treat myself and other people?) Christy Harrison, a nutrition therapist who examined the issue of excess weight and the virus in a Wired article published in April, said in an interview last month that few of the early research studies on the matter controlled for race, socioeconomic status or quality of care — “social determinants of health that we know explain the lion’s share of health disparities between groups of people,” she wrote. Nor did they control for how doctors’ biases influence the way they care for higher-weight patients. But strong evidence exists that obesity (defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher) puts you at greater risk of dying from COVID-19.