I felt an immediate kinship with Julie R. Thomson when I read the opening line of an article she wrote for HuffPost.com’s Food & Drink site. “The next best thing to eating food, is talking about it.”

It made me remember a game my mother and I played when I’d be too sick to attend school. If I had to name it now, I’d call it The Great Comfort-Food Face-Off.

Mom would enter my bedroom and say something like, “Could I ever go for some sticky buns from Wegman’s. Reheated with butter on top.”

“How about a bear claw from Dutch-Maid?” I’d counter. “Or a couple of their eclairs?”

We’d tantalize one another with a few more of our favorite comfort foods, and then the game would end in one of two ways. Either mom would make a dump cake, a wacky cake, wet-bottom shoo-fly cupcakes, Rice Krispies squares or something else just as calorically dense and comforting, or she’d call dad and tell him to stop at Wegman’s or Dutch-Maid on his way home for lunch.

As we’d eat whatever mom had selected as our afternoon snack, she’d do something that she’d never do when I was fully healthy: encourage me to gorge myself. If I did, it meant in her mind that my appetite was back and I was getting better.

And since no boy ever wants to let his momma down, I’d eat and eat and thoroughly enjoy myself until mom would finally say, “Let’s leave a little bit for your brother.”

While I don’t use that game as an excuse to overeat anymore, it seems as if many others have discovered another reason to do so: the stay-at-home order. At least a survey of more than 1,000 WebMD readers released on May 18 suggests that.

In it, 47 percent of the female and 22 percent of the male respondents claimed to have gained weight “due to COVID restrictions.” And the amount of weight gained - considering the stay-at-home order was in effect at the time of the survey for no more than eight weeks - is significant.

Forty-seven percent of the 47 percent who did gain weight gained between 7 and 20 pounds, with another 4 percent gaining 21 pounds or more. Michael Smith, MD, WebMD’s chief medical director offered this explanation: “We’re turning to comfort foods to help ourselves feel better.”

That good feeling that comes from consuming a comfort food, though, is fleeting. The bad feeling that comes from not being able to button up your favorite pair of blue jeans or losing your breath by the third flight of stairs, unfortunately, is not.

But there is a way to indulge in feel-good foods without weight gain. You alter them so that they are also good-for-you foods, too.

It’s not that hard to do. Granted, when you replace “bad” ingredients like sugar and butter and replace them with “good” ones like applesauce and black beans, the taste of the comfort food seems to diminish.

But taste is only one component of a comfort food. Texture, or what some call mouthfeel, is equally as important.

If you create a healthier variation of a comfort food with a satisfying mouthfeel, you are far more likely to accept the swap - even though the substitute isn’t quite as sweet or nearly as fatty. Most food preferences are acquired, so if you eat the substitute often enough you may even come to prefer it.

Since you’re more likely to need a comfort food at the end of the day, let’s first focus on a supper substitute. I’ve always found noodles to be comforting, whether they be in macaroni and cheese, chicken pot pie, or some sort of Italian meal, and I still like their mouthfeel.

What I don’t like are the calories.

The suggested 2-ounce serving size on a typical spaghetti box lists 210. Back in my early 20s, I’d eat four times that for supper, get a good dose of comfort - and an overdose of carbohydrates.

Of the 840 total calories in 8 ounces of most dry pastas, 672 come from carbs.

Shirataki noodles contain no durum wheat, the main ingredient in traditional pastas, and I get a similar mouth feel eating them - and far fewer calories. The brand I usually purchase is packaged in water, sold in 8-ounce bags, and I use two at a time.

But two bags contain only 90 calories, a savings of 750 calories when compared to my old habit, and all the carbs are fibrous.

While most good-food-for-bad-food swaps don’t create such a dramatic difference, it’s pretty easy to produce half of that. Do so once a day, and you could drop 1.5 pounds without doing anything else in two weeks.

So consider reworking those foods you consume for a type of nourishment that’s more than nutritional. For a few more examples, read next week’s column.