The Weight Of Grief: Eating Up Your Feelings or Starving Yourself With Sorrow

When we picture someone grieving, we’re often shown the same image: hollow cheeks, a shrinking body, clothes hanging from a suddenly smaller frame. The beautiful, tragic, almost glamorous picture of the bereaved person who has simply… stopped eating.

But what happens when grief does the opposite?

In this episode of It’s A Death Sentence, Emma and Carrie have one of their most candid conversations yet about weight, grief, trauma, food and the complicated relationship so many of us have with our bodies.

Because for millions of people, stress and trauma don’t make the weight fall off. They make us eat. They make us comfort eat, lose our routines, reach for things that make us feel better for five minutes — and sometimes gain weight when we are already struggling to cope.

And what about those of us for whom weight management was already a lifelong battle before grief came along?

Emma gets brutally honest about her own relationship with weight, including her use of Ozempic and Mounjaro, the pressure to maintain a particular body size, and the lifelong cycle of losing, gaining, restricting and starting again. Carrie joins her in exploring how much of this is actually about food — and how much is about everything else going on underneath it.

Because grief doesn't just live in your head.

It lives in your body too.

And yet, when Emma and Carrie went looking for the language to describe weight gain through grief, they found remarkably little.

One term they discovered was Kummerspeck — a German word which literally translates roughly as “grief bacon.”

Grief bacon.

Really?

It says a lot about how we talk about bodies that even the language we have for gaining weight through emotional pain can feel flippant, judgemental or downright unkind.

Meanwhile, there are countless poetic descriptions and cultural references for becoming thin, gaunt or emaciated through grief — as though losing weight is somehow the more believable, more acceptable or even more beautiful physical manifestation of suffering.

So Emma and Carrie go down a rather unexpected rabbit hole.

They explore the language, symbolism and somatics of grief and the body, looking at some of the fascinating phrases used around the world to describe the physical effects of losing someone — and asking why we seem to have such a limited vocabulary for what happens when grief makes us bigger rather than smaller.

This isn't a diet episode.

It isn't about telling you what you should weigh, what you should eat, or how you should look.

It's about the weight we carry — literally, emotionally and culturally.

And, as ever, Emma and Carrie bring honesty, compassion, curiosity and a healthy dose of humour to a subject that can be incredibly difficult to talk about.

Because grief doesn't have a body type.

And neither should it have a dress size.

This is The Weight of Grief.

And that’s us for this episode of It’s A Death Sentence!

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And finally… Halloween!

Come and celebrate the success of the podcast with us at our Halloween Masquerade Ball, Saturday 31st October at Moor Hall, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham.

There’ll be food, a string quartet, live band, DJ, dancing until late.

Tickets are on Eventbrite — link Eventbrite Masquerade Halloween Ball ticket

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