The past nearly two years have been difficult for a number of reasons, none the least of which has been the pandemic. Even people who managed to be very productive during the health crisis and stay positive and hopeful for the future had trouble with many aspects of it, but the former star of Full House and Fuller House, Jodie Sweetin, is now opening up about her pandemic stress and the truly scary way she lost 37 pounds while the world was in the thick of it.
As we all know, losing weight tends to be one of those goals that most people have at least once in their life, for a number of reasons. And, even though there are several ways to drop a few dress sizes, it’s not uncommon for people to land on some unhealthy ways to go about it. Well, Jodie Sweetin spoke to the Allison Interviews podcast recently, and while talking about her pandemic stress, revealed that even though she wasn’t really trying to lose weight, the hit that her mental health took led to a scary side effect when it came to dropping pounds. As Sweetin said:
I know I was a mess during the pandemic; I was not a fully functioning person. I was awful. I lost like 37 pounds, ‘cause I’m a stress starver. But, not in a good way. I just stopped eating; I couldn’t keep food down. I’ll be real honest about it, the pandemic was not good for me. I have severe anxiety and depression anyway, [and] it really didn’t do any favors for my mental health. So, I really struggled with it, and for me it was a time of feeling really out of control.
This may be a relatively extreme example, but Sweetin is certainly far from the only person who felt a loss of control during the pandemic, and had it lead to some very undesirable consequences for both their physical and mental health. Even someone who already deals with anxiety and depression couldn’t have anticipated how such an event would impact their life, even if they and their family were able to stay safe during it.
I’m sure there were millions of people (or even more) who decided to embark on a weight loss journey during the pandemic to try to regain some sense of control over their destiny during what has been an incredibly rough time, but such was not the case for Sweetin. While calling herself a “stress starver” makes it seem like she was somewhat in charge of the weight loss, it turns out that Sweetin was actually so stressed that she couldn’t retain much of what she ate. And, in many ways, that has to be a lot worse than not eating on purpose.
Luckily, even though Jodie Sweetin says that a large part of her would love to “re-route us into the alternate timeline” where there was no pandemic, she has still been able to take away some positives from it, and “wouldn’t change the lessons” of the pandemic, like being more appreciative of each other and having the chance to become more involved in the world. And, hopefully, she’s healthier now because of it.
