Five ways to manage your food and feelings during lockdown
The new year is usually a time when people would be heading to the gym and getting back into a health and fitness routine.
With the whole of the UK under lockdown to try and bring down the rate of coronavirus and protect the NHS from being overwhelmed, kickstarting the new healthy lifestyle will be difficult for many people.
GP and host of the popular health podcast ‘Feel Better, Live More’ Dr Rangan Chatterjee has just written his latest book ‘Feel Great, Lose Weight’. He shared five ways to manage your food, feelings and generally improve your health and wellbeing on BBC Radio 5 Live Drive.
The Kinder Approach
We’ve been restricted of many things during the coronavirus pandemic, so are strict diet regimes really what people want at the moment?
“We used to only eat food to fill a hole in our stomachs, now we are eating food to fill a hole in our hearts.” - Dr Chatterjee
Dr Chatterjee says: “The truth is for most people, diets don’t tend to work, certainly not in the long term.
“Most diet books tend to just look at what you eat and I think the current times are a prime example that what you eat is not always what we need help addressing,” he added.
The GP explained that around 45% of us eat more in response to stress and suggested to people who may be doing this to really ask themselves: ‘Is it a new diet book you really need or better help managing your stress levels?’
Bicep curls before a cuppa
If you find yourself in a bit of a dilemma between wanting to be healthy and also treat yourself to nice things… you can do both.
Dr Chatterjee says: “I don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive.
“A really great tip for people I have used with patients for years is, if you have a dumbbell or a kettlebell at home… I would say keep one of them in your kitchen and if you’re working from home at the moment, every time you go into your kitchen to make a cup of tea or coffee, just pick up that weight and do five bicep curls on each arm and make that a habit,” he added.
Rangan told us that overtime, this will help to improve people’s confidence, self-esteem and their physical and mental health, which will also help them make better decisions in other areas in their life.
The 3Fs
Dr Rangan Chatterjee's 3Fs to overcome emotional eating
Eating too much? Dr Rangan Chatterjee tells BBC Radio 5 Live his 3Fs to think about.
Are you reaching for the biscuit tin more often during lockdown?
An exercise Dr Rangan mentions in his new book to overcome emotional eating is to try out the 3Fs.
The first F is Feel.
Rangan says: “Just take a pause and ask yourself, what are you really feeling? Are you really hungry? Or actually are you bored? Are you lonely? Has the work been stressful today and it’s your way of treating yourself?”
You can go ahead and have the biscuit, but it’s starting the process of “building that awareness up” over why you are snacking, he added.
The second f is Feed.
Rangan says: “How does your chosen food feed that feeling?”
For example, when you’re stressed - do you feel better when you have biscuits? It’s all about understanding how you feel when you have the food, he explained.
The third F is Find.
Rangan says: “Can you find a non-food behaviour to deal with that same emotion?”
If you eat more when you’re stressed for example, he suggested that doing another activity such as yoga, having a bath or phoning a friend to unwind as an alternative may help.
Avoid mindless eating
You might be noticing that you are eating in front of a screen more while working from home at the moment – don’t worry, even Rangan admitted that he has been doing this sometimes!
The GP told Drive: “If you eat mindlessly, you eat more at that meal and you might eat more at subsequent meals for the entire day.
“If you are working from home, maybe when it is lunch time, just pop the laptop down, pop the phone away and just sit down and actually pay attention whilst you’re eating,” Rangan added.
“The way I help some of my patients to lose weight and improve their health, is not by paying attention to what they eat, but by helping them change how they eat.”
Try to improve your sleep
Are you struggling to sleep during these tough times?
According to Rangan, if you want to lose weight and live a healthier lifestyle, improving your sleep “is the first thing” you should be doing.
“If you sleep only five and a half hours a night compared to eight hours a night, the science shows us that you will eat, on average, 22% more calories the next day,” he added.
To put this into context, over five days, this means you are eating a whole extra day’s worth of calories - Rangan explained.
Listen back to BBC Radio 5 Live Drive every weekday from 4pm on BBC Sounds.
