Corona Chronicles (Vol1.Issue10)

This might be Issue 10 of the Corona Chronicles but it was not day 10 of quarantine. I read an article on newsela and responded to it for my kids to read.  It was a great article about stress eating and basically eating because you're sad.  This is something I do all the time.  Or I just don't eat at all.  Both were addressed in the article.  I only responded to the stress eating part because I was writing too much and needed to stop... So I've added my thoughts on the not eating enough part (the original sort of hints at it when I talk about staying hydrated). 

So enjoy my educational and thoughtful advice to the children. 

Wednesday, April 1, 2020:
    Happy April Fool’s Day!  I wish there were some fun pranks to pull today, but unfortunately I am coming up short with pranks this year. 
    Anyway… This morning when I opened my email and after I replied to parents and students I opened my newsela email.  Before we were doing distance learning, I rarely opened my newsela emails because most of the time they didn’t pertain to what we were doing in class.  Now I open them for COVID-19 updates and some fun, lighthearted news articles. Today, when I opened it, I knew that I would be using it to write my Chronicle entry as soon as I saw the headline “How to deal with stress-eating for comfort in a time of anxiety.”  Not only do I love the topic, but I know how much it could help all of us.  
    Do you ever walk into the kitchen and open the fridge or pantry and see that there’s nothing you want to eat and then go back to the couch or your bed? Do you go back to the fridge or pantry 5 minutes later to check again only to realize the food fairy has not put in the snacks you're looking for?  I do it all the time. Especially when I’ve been home for 19 days and I’m running out of things to do around the house. I notice I do it a lot around 3 pm or 8 pm when I’m finished with my normal day. This is a time when our stress and anxiety levels are constantly growing. For students, it's a time of uncertainty of not understanding assignments or not knowing how they’re going to manage their time and finish everything.  For some adults, it’s a time of questioning how they’re going to pay bills next month. For teachers, it’s making adjustments from seeing students in person every day to making their entire classroom digital and trying to support students every day. So stress-eating is a very common thing happening in most households right now. 
    I can tell you that I buy snacks every week.  Usually the cosmic brownies or swiss rolls - those are my favorites. However, those are not the snacks that are going to make me feel better.  The article says “snacks with a lot of sugar can cause bodily inflammation that increases fatigue, anxiety, and depression.” None of those sound great and we are all at a greater risk of feeling that way already because we are spending less time outside. It’s easy to eat an entire bag of potato chips without thinking because hunger from being bored doesn’t respond to any foods you put into your body (unless they happen to be healthy snacks… but your body doesn’t want healthy snacks when you’re bored).  “Physical hunger lasts longer and is more receptive to a variety of foods,” Deanna Minich (a nutritionist with the American Nutrition Association) says to explain the differences in hunger types. 
    The suggestions to relieve this “stress hunger” is to do something else that is comforting: breathing exercises, movement, spirituality, social interactions, hobbies or time in nature are all activities you can do instead. I go running every other day to get my “outside time” and it helps me feel less guilty about eating the cosmic brownies.  I also make sure to text my friends every day so I get that little bit of social interaction (and I live with my dad so I usually go annoy him). And I cross-stitch, read, and play video games as my hobbies.  
    So next time you go looking in the fridge 5 times in 30 minutes, try to ask yourself “Am I about to eat because I’m physically hungry or because I feel stressed or sad or bored?” And make sure you are drinking enough water to stay hydrated and healthy.

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