“Grief bacon” — the visible excess weight gained from comfort-eating during emotional or psychological distress..
“Grief bacon” — the visible excess weight gained from comfort-eating during emotional or psychological distress.
Names the result — the fat/weight gained — not the act of comfort-eating itself (that is closer to Frustfressen, “frustration-eating”). Concrete and bodily, with a wry, self-deprecating tone, rather than a pure emotion word: grief or sorrow is its trigger, Kummerspeck its rueful physical consequence.
Kummer “grief, sorrow, worry” + Speck “bacon, fat” = “grief bacon.”
A transparent colloquial compound of Kummer + Speck, listed by Duden (register: umgangssprachlich).
Stable in meaning as “fat gained from emotional eating”; no earlier divergent sense documented.
A real, Duden-listed colloquial German word — but in English overwhelmingly a “funny untranslatable German word” listicle staple (“grief bacon”), usually presented jocularly.