I wasn't greedy, I was ill.
I thought I was a gluttonous pig but it turns out I had an eating disorder.
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It was 11 pm and I was shouting through the now-locked automatic door of the all-night garage wearing a coat over my pyjamas. I’d driven there after hours of deliberating about whether I could, should or would have a Snickers ice cream bar. My mind had been see-sawing about whether to have a ‘treat’ or not. When the cashier asked me what I needed from the other side of the glass, my response surprised even me: ‘FOOD!’
I can only assume he thought my late-night visit was for something urgent, like medicine. The best way I can describe it now is that I was on some sort of autopilot. I wasn’t fully in control but was overtaken by tunnel vision to answer a siren call to fill myself with food.
I’d been satisfying these urges since childhood and by the time I found myself on a petrol station forecourt, aged 39, tipping the scales at 200 pounds, I had such a toxic relationship with food that I would vacillate between bingeing on it and going as long as I could without it.
Six years on, it’s a far cry from what my life and relationship with food look like today. The only reason I’ve been able to break three decades of what felt like a food addiction was to call it what it was: an eating disorder.
Eating disorders don’t look like this though, do they? Eating disorders are life-threatening; where restriction can prove deadly, or bouts of over-eating and purging can have serious long-term health implications. An eating disorder doesn’t look like an inability to control yourself around a buffet, sneaking to the fridge in the middle of the night, cancelling on your friends at the last minute for dinner because you’ve already eaten more than you wanted that day, or venturing out after dark to a garage to get a ‘fix’. That is greed, a total lack of self-control and gluttony and a choice I made. Or so I used to think…
It was only when I spoke to Dr Joanna Silver, Lead Psychological Therapist at Orri, an eating disorder treatment centre in London, on my podcast a few years ago, that something she said left me in no doubt at all that it was an illness. She described ‘an obsession with food, size, shape and weight’ and it was the first time that I realised I had binge eating disorder – a disorder which invisibly sabotages you from the second you wake up to the second you go to sleep, and which affects three times the number of people diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa combined. I wasn’t choosing this, I wasn’t wilfully eating to excess unbothered about the consequences. I thought about it more than I thought about anything else.
As with all eating disorders, the physical impact is only part of the issue and, for me, it was the constant mental chatter that was crippling and life-limiting. I ‘postponed’ everything from applying for jobs, starting relationships and going on holiday. At the core of those decisions was the feeling that I could do all of those things – but only once I’d lost weight and wasn’t always obsessed with what I was eating next. What that really meant, of course, was that I could only begin to live my life when I wasn’t governed by an insatiable and irrational hunger for food.
Indeed, Joanna Silver says that, ‘a lot of people out there who look really healthy or ‘normal’ are really, really suffering so we mustn’t get too caught up on the physical.’
I accepted I had an eating disorder five years ago, but it’s taken me until now to feel comfortable saying it out loud. For a long time, I felt fraudulent occupying a space inhabited by people with anorexia, when the visible manifestation of my issue was being overweight or obese, something which characterises nearly 40% and 26% of the UK population respectively, according to The Health Survey for England 2021.
Joanna Silver says lack of awareness is compounded by perception of eating disorders, ‘we think they look a certain way and we have this image of a white, stick-thin girl in her teenage years so people are often not on the lookout for how it might present itself in other bodies and other ways.’
This perception also impacts our willingness to seek help, ‘People might have had negative experiences about being overweight and they may feel ashamed because society labels these feelings and behaviours as a lack of willpower, they worry that if they do go to the doctor they’ll get laughed at or their experiences won’t be validated’.
As for when my issues with food and body image started, I’m not sure – and, in the conversations I’ve had with experts since I don’t know if it matters. I understood from an early age that my weight was a problem that needed to be solved. As an overweight child, I felt and heard the vocabulary about my size and shape change over the years, morphing from ‘plump’ and ‘chubby’ to the slightly less endearing ‘fat’ and ‘obese’.
Aged 11, I was the only child in a Weight Watchers meeting, feeling embarrassingly out of place, yet more at home with conversations about stretch marks, portion control and a ‘sweet tooth’ than I was among any playground banter. This was the late 80s when you could argue that diet culture was at its height, and weight was simply a fault to be fixed by diet and/or exercise - the doctor had referenced a weight problem, so my parents did what was the advised thing to do at the time: get me on a diet.
If only it were so simple.
I have heard the ‘eat less, move more’ argument many times, and it makes sense. Over the years, I’ve tried a vast array of diets and become literate in everything from points, calories, macros and fasting windows - but none of that acknowledged one crucial factor: food wasn’t made up of units of energy for me, food was comfort, relief, and it was always there for me. Satisfying the urge to eat had nothing to do with whether I was hungry or not. It was a compulsion, an irresistible impulse. It wasn’t until I was in my early forties that I finally understood that and could begin to loosen its grasp on me.
This is why I’ve struggled to align with the body positivity movement. Accepting my body when it was heavier, “learning to love” it as myriad Instagram posts encourage every day, was to love a body that I was harming with the weapon of food. To ‘have the doughnut if you want the doughnut’ in my case validated disordered eating.
The answer, I discovered, was to carve out some time, even just a split-second, between the urge to eat and the act of satisfying it. My recovery has been about pausing and overriding the irrational, sabotaging voice with a rational, supportive one.
There have been some ‘bumps’ along the way, and there is no cookie-cutter plan for recovery. I didn’t seek professional counselling. Reading about the ‘other’ types of eating disorders made it clear to me that this is what I was dealing with and, at the time, I didn’t see the point of putting a label on it. My priority was making lifestyle changes so it no longer impacted my daily life. I discussed the topic of food addiction at length with various experts on my podcast, which helped and confirmed that I was dealing with disordered eating.
But fundamentally, after years of blaming my hormones, my thyroid, my genes, my glands and even society’s expectations of women, I was honest with myself: I was the only thing standing between me and the way I wanted to look and feel.
Gradually, I found a way to eat that wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to an urge but was a choice I made to make me feel good in the long term. It wasn’t a diet - it was a commitment to feel better, make better choices, be accountable and get off the wild ride of being ‘addicted’ to food. That said, I know I’ll probably always have to make a conscious effort not to fall back into my old habits.
Labelling my complicated feelings around food as an eating disorder directed me towards the tools and support to overcome it. What once felt static, hopeless and something I tried to hide, could now gather momentum away from where I’d previously been stuck. And there is so much help out there. When I opened up about my experience on my Instagram page and my podcast, my inbox was flooded with people, men and women of all ages, who all said something resembling ‘You’ve put into words what I’ve been hiding inside for years’. I even had one tearful voice note from a follower who told me she finally had hope that she could end her ‘toxic’ relationship with food too.
At 46 years old, I have to make peace with the fact my problems with food meant I said ‘no’ more than I said ‘yes’. I was trapped in an invisible waiting room entirely of my own making that I couldn’t explain or describe to anyone else. But, if I had dismissed the cause as greed and a lack of willpower, rather than face up to what it was, I wouldn’t be where I am now, which is that, for the first time in my life, I feel comfortable in my own skin.
Thank you for your transparency about how food had a hold on you. I too was in WW at an early age. This comment resonated with me: “I understood from an early age that my weight was a problem that needed to be solved”. That has shaped my life. Years of struggling and I am finally able to eat healthy and enjoy but still have to watch for triggers.