It's certainly not a common word in German. In fact, this is the first time I've ever seen it, and all google search results are either dictionary entries or English articles that can be attributed to the Anglosphere's obsession with German compound words.
I love how I just automatically accept the German cookie banner without reading it (but understanding exactly what it says). Modern internet ist scheisse.
Northern germany also knows it. Maybe it has something to do with age. It's usage has declined over the years, I think. Maybe because it belittles the underlying issue, as it sounds rather "cute" to a native speaker. Just an educated guess, though.
I would not call it a common word. But every native speaker who reads more than Facebook status updates should have met it. Being an obvious compound of 2 words really everybody knows it does not require any real learning effort, the first time you see it you understand it intuitively.
The other week I similarly saw a conversation about calendar optimization to not look like Swiss cheese turn towards discussing the process of making Greek yogurt.
It still didn't make sense to me so I googled it and found,
"Kummerspeck is the name for excess fat gained by emotional eating – specifically, the excessive eating people do in times of stress or sorrow."
So it literally refers to the _fat_ (speck) someone gains by eating while feeling _grief or sorrow_ (kummer). Except that the specific word for fat they use is the word for _animal fat_ and in some instances literally means bacon. What an interesting word.
True. As a native speaker I know the word, but the sentence makes little sense to me.
One could gain Kummerspeck (over weeks, months or years), but one could not be looking like Kummerspeck or sitting there like Kummerspeck. Unless in English the word has been loaned and the meaning shifted over time as it sometimes happens with loan words.
Man, just coming back to this thread. Thank you for saying this. To add a slight bit more color, I didn’t think of myself as fat and depressed in that moment, more that I had been feeling gorged on the emotions of life and had metaphorically eaten my sorrows.
To me, kummerspeck is the feeling of being unable to distinguish between the tears running down your face or the grease on your chin. It’s a feeling of relishing in the grief of burying someone who would want you to eat a ton of bacon at their funeral to celebrate their life.
Emotions are rarely simple or easy to explain. It’s still worth the effort to try though.
Both wander and lust are also English words, albeit with slightly different shades of meaning, so it should be comprehensible to a non-German speaker who has never encountered it before, whereas Kummerspeck would not be.
To another German it's amusing that the individual words exist in German and English, but don't quite mean the same things in each language, i.e. are not really translations of each other.
Source: native speaker, reasonably literate