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Emotional eating doesn’t have to be bad. It can be good. It can be empowering. And it can be therapeutic – especially with everything that’s going on in our world these days.

Let’s rewind to last March.

When the pandemic started, I was six months pregnant with my first child, who is now a bright, cheery and healthy 8-month-old baby girl name Poppy. To say that this was an easy time in my life would be a lie. With the typical anxieties that come along with being a new parent, having a global pandemic on my hands definitely had a profound effect on me.

The thought of being in quarantine, away from friends and family, while I was entering this new phase of my life felt like someone was holding my head under water.

Every day I’d find myself obsessing over whether my shortness of breath, congestion, inability to focus and sleepless nights were in fact pregnancy side effects or a fatal strand of the coronavirus that would wreak havoc on my body and unborn baby.

After allowing myself to sit with these feelings (and by sit, I mean paralyzed with anxiety) for a few weeks, I finally felt like I had the strength to do something about it.

Surely I wasn’t the only one feeling so unsure, so scared and so alone in a time that was supposed to be full of happiness and excitement.

That’s when I started to turn to my Instagram community in a way that I had never done before.

I made a point to teach my followers how to make something that was not only tasty, but easy, affordable and modifiable. Because, let’s be real – one extra trip to the grocery store was not then, nor is it now, an easy feat.

At first, I would do these sessions one night a week, but it soon turned into a daily cooking class. I was getting so many encouraging messages, not only from other pregnant women, but from others who were feeling the same way.

And that’s when it hit me.

I started to rewire my brain about emotional eating. Something in me said, “Hey, girl, I see you’re using food to comfort yourself, and I wanted to let you know that it’s OK. You don’t have to feel guilty about this. It is helping you and empowering so many other people, too.”

Think about it. When friends, family, social events and other supports systems weren’t physically there to comfort, food and the act of creating something delicious still were.

And in a way, these nightly cooking classes started to become my therapy and a healing place for other people who were going through this rough time alone.