Intro
After a breakup, appetite goes away. Understand you are not alone in experiencing this.
After a painful breakup, your appetite may decrease because emotional pain affects your body chemistry, including your hormones.
A breakup triggers the same stress responses that would occur if a loved one died; in both a breakup and a death, someone has left your life. This effect applies to other deep losses like the loss of a best friend or a pet.
After the pain of a loss, it’s important to take care of yourself and continue to pursue adequate and superior nutrition to maintain or improve the quality of your life, as well as encourage fulfillment through the pursuit of mastery on the path. This can be neurobiologically difficult after a loss, as the main hormone that controls hunger, ghrelin, can be suppressed after a major loss.
Refusing to eat while having hunger is a different problem. This is a self-love/self-care problem. This entry specifically talks about the sensation of losing your appetite after a major loss.
Post breakup Nausea
After a breakup, you may have no appetite or a reduced appetite, and the idea of food could make you nauseous. You may even be nauseous with an appetite.
After a breakup, your brain puts you into a fight or flight state, where blood flow moves away from the stomach and towards the brain and muscles, preparing to defend against an attack that never comes.
After a traumatic event like a major car accident or a mugging, you aren’t very hungry in the immediate aftermath; the aftermath of a breakup is no different and can last for a long time.
Unfortunately, the best cure for this is time. But you can meditate to empty your mind and get there faster.
Don’t linger in the post-breakup state. Leave when you are able to, not when you feel ready to go.
You can use breathwork to get out of the fight or flight state. Consider adding breathwork methods to your code that work for you for breakups, and everything else.
Below are strategies to reduce undereating and increase appetite after a breakup.
Comfort foods
After a breakup, eat comfort foods while trying to stay away from foods that offer pleasure without fulfillment. Foods that offer pleasure without fulfillment include desserts and sweets like candy, cake, ice cream, etc.
Whole fruit is fine.
When you hear comfort foods, think calorie-dense, satiating foods. Candy is calorie-dense but not satiating. Think favorite pizza place, Thai food, Italian, Mexican food, food that is so delectable it’s irresistible even in emotionally pained circumstances.
If you needed to break up with someone to improve your life, you deserve to reward yourself. If someone left you, it may be for the better. If you deserved it, reflect and grow.
Eating your favorite foods in the moment can help keep your mind out of the past. You can be less dietarily responsible than normal, but don’t self-sabotage your body or ruin your lifestyle during this time.
Continue(or start) to pursue body mastery
The painful loss of a breakup affects dopamine, the reward chemical that encourages the pursuit of bodily mastery, and your motivation to go to the gym. The cultivation of discipline at all points of life is crucial so you operate off of doing what’s right for you, as opposed to operating off of your feelings.
You need to continue, or start, to lift weights or do some other anaerobic activity to encourage appetite. Think heavy labor, rock climbing, fighting, or working with force. Cardiovascular activity doesn’t increase the appetite like force-based activities.
Strength training is an effective distraction from a breakup. Training increases hunger because your body interprets the damage from weightlifting as productive stress. You will feel better after strength training and you will be hungry. If you eat breakfast usually and don’t feel hunger, work out early, and you will feast afterward.
After a breakup, start strength training, or train with more intensity than you have before. If you have been waiting to remodel your house, or do some yard work, do it all, and eat well after.
Protein Shakes
Two scoops of protein powder is roughly 240 calories and around 50 grams of protein. Not the highest amount of calories, but a solid amount of protein.
Even during post-breakup undereating, you need to keep your protein intake high so you do not lose muscle via lack of protein.
You can have multiple double-scooped shakes per day. 3 times per day is 150G of protein; aim for 0.8 -1.2 grams of protein per pound of your target bodyweight.
Use protein shakes to supplement eating. Having a two-scoop shake is easier for most than eating 50g of protein via chicken or steak. Whole food is superior, but it’s more important to hit your protein goals with supplements than it is to miss goals with whole foods.
You can add peanut butter, heavy whipping cream, honey, and many other additives to shakes to add more calories and improve flavor. You can drink 50+ grams of protein in under a minute.
Protein shakes are an essential tool to ease post-breakup reduced appetite.
Liquid calories and nutrition
Like a lack of hunger after a breakup, you may feel no motivation to drink water; recall, operate off of discipline instead of motivation.
Water is even more important than food, although both are important. You can go days without food, you cannot go days without water; you should not go days without food after a breakup unless you are intentionally fasting.
If eating is difficult post-separation, you can drink your calories and your nutrition. A Ninja bullet blender is inexpensive and easy to use. Drink smoothies full of fruits and vegetables.
Drink coconut water.
Drink smoothies.
Drink protein shakes.
Do not drink juice. We mentioned before that juice is the pursuit of pleasure because it cannot be fulfilled, unlike eating fruit, which satiates you because of the fiber content, among other components of the whole fruit.
Drink calories but forgo drinking sugar.
Extra: Continue to take at least SOME of your supplements
If you take a large amount of supplements, it may be difficult to find the drive to take 15 pills and additional powders after a breakup.
At least take the essentials, the easy-to-swallow and big impact vitamins, like vitamin D3.
If you do not take supplements, vitamin D3 is inexpensive and will make you feel better, which will make you think you’re feeling better from your breakup. It does not matter what makes you feel better; what matters is getting back to the path to mastery as soon as possible.
Some vitamins can blend well into a smoothie or protein shake, so you can drink your nutrition that way. The sugar from smoothie fruit will encourage smoothie consumption without the damage of binge-eating junk food.
If you’re going through a breakup and stop taking D3, fish oil, ZMA, or boron, you are going to feel worse due to the lack of nutrition, which may be wrongly attributed to the breakup.
Vitamin B1 and fish oil are shown to increase appetite. Make sure to continue to take these, or start taking them after a breakup. Both are inexpensive and powerful.
Breakups are hard. Remember that the path goes forward, so live in the present and for the future. Use calamities for growth because what other choice is there? To use tragedy to self-destruct? To torture yourself?
Supporting yourself is a better choice. You deserve to support yourself.
If you feel like you need permission to love yourself, let this be your permission. You are worth the utmost self-care.
