What I Ate When My Heart Was Broken

Many years ago, I went through a devasting breakup. I felt like my heart had been ripped out and drop-kicked to the moon.

I was flattened by a level of sadness and depression I had never experienced before. I cried for weeks. My body felt weighed down by grief.

As a result, I lost much of my appetite and my desire to cook. 

My partner and I loved cooking together and the thought of doing it solo was just too painful. 

Very little sounded appealing and I couldn’t stomach anything fresh. 

The only foods that felt tolerable and manageable were buttered pasta and peanut-butter toast, plus banana bread muffins and chocolate chip cookies from a local bakery.

For weeks, these foods comforted me when little else could. They helped me survive one of the hardest, darkest times of my life. 

What I Needed
Despite being deeply entrenched in diet culture and obsessed with controlling my weight at the time, which sadly played a role in the breakup, I’m grateful I let myself eat foods I typically restricted.

Of course, there was a part of me—my inner Food Police—that made me feel bad about my eating. However, it wasn’t as strong as the part of me that desperately wanted to ease my suffering. 

Although my chosen foods didn’t erase my sadness or grief, they did help sustain me. They gave me the emotional comfort and physical energy I needed to make it through each day. 

Demonized by Diet Culture
Despite its tremendous power to soothe, diet culture has demonized comfort food. 

It has taught us to feel bad, guilty, weak or ashamed when we turn to it to navigate tough times. 

As a result, we often feel we have to justify our desires, hide our eating, and make up for our “food sins.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Rightful Coping Tool
Turning to food to self-soothe is a natural human behavior, one we do from the day we’re born.

Its ability to soothe our mind, body, heart and soul is something to embrace and celebrate. 

Providing comfort is just one of the many roles it plays in our lives, one of the many ways it meets our needs, and one of the many gifts it gives us.

For many of us, food is an easily accessible coping mechanism—one that has a rightful place in our emotional coping toolkit.

Compassion and Curiosity
My “heartbreak diet” didn’t last forever. I eventually added in more foods and made my way back to cooking. 

I’ve had much tougher, sadder times since that breakup and it’s been interesting to see how each experience has impacted my eating.

Because I’ve worked hard to make peace with food and my body—something that was spurred on by that breakup—I’m now able to observe what I’m experiencing with compassion and curiosity rather than criticism and judgment.

And I appreciate all the more the power of food to comfort.