Hi, welcome to the Young Widow Podcast. I'm Britany, your host, and I'm happy you could join today for episode 26: Why We Keep Everything.

So I just came off of a conference weekend where I was speaking in Houston and this question came up by somebody that was attending the conference and it was in a different workshop than I was hosting.

And I jotted down in my notebook that I wanted to do a podcast on this as soon as possible, because I'm a 'why' person and what that means is that I wanna know why my brain does things. Why do I have these weird habits and grief?

And so if you're like me, I wanna explain the science behind why we keep everything after our person dies.

And there are three major things here that we're gonna talk about: memory connection, the dopamine factor, and then loss aversion.

And so with that, let's just jump in and I'm just gonna start from my perspective.

 Hi, Welcome to the Young Widow Podcast. I'm Britany, your host, and thanks for joining today for Episode 25: When Grief Took My Appetite. All right, so this one's going to be a little bit more of a harder one to record. You know, I hesitated to even sit down and record this one in a longer version. If you've been on my Instagram, I did a shorter reel of this, but there was so much feedback on it that I wanted to dive into this one. This is something I still struggle with today and I think that's what makes it worth talking about because I'm five years in grief.

And so let's jump in.

Today we're going to talk about grief and food, or for a lot of us, the way grief completely destroys our relationship with eating. And not in the way people might assume not the dramatic, I can't eat because food is repulsive. No, food stopped existing. I stopped caring. I stopped noticing hunger at all.

Why grief messes with our appetite, not just emotionally, but what's actually happening in our brain and nervous system.

And then we're going to talk about how food became an afterthought and grief not just for me, but for so many of us and why it's so damn hard to change even years later.

And then I'm briefly going to touch on why some of us have a different response to food, which is eating everything that we want to eat whenever we want to eat it.

So Let's jump in!

So, we all get to this place in grief..sometimes more than once..where everything just starts feeling… stuck. It’s like, Is this life now? Is this all there is? Because every day looks exactly the same. You wake up, do the things you have to do, go to bed, wake up, repeat. And at some point, you realize you’re not even living… you’re just existing.

That’s what I call grief-induced Groundhog’s Day.

So today, we’re going to talk about how to start breaking out of it.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

1. Why this feeling hits so hard at the beginning of the year..what’s actually happening in your brain after weeks of holiday grief.
2. How small shifts can jolt your brain out of autopilot..and why even the tiniest changes can help.
3. Examples of easy ways to start making those shifts..so you can start today if you wanted.
4. How this connects to small wins in grief..because momentum, even tiny momentum, matters.

Alright, let’s get into it.