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Whenever I’m learning from or working with a coach, I want to know all about their own experience. I want to know who they are as a person and what they’ve been through to understand why they now do what they do.
So, with this being my first Binge Free & Worthy article, I thought the best place to start would be to share my own 14-year binge eating experience with you…
In this, I get into how my binge eating disorder developed, why it turned into bulimia and my journey to breaking free from binge eating once and for all.
I’ve also recorded a video where I talk about all of this really candidly, so if you prefer, you can watch that here 👇
Where It All Began
Although I first started binge eating at 16, looking back further, I can see three traits within myself that I believe lead me to bingeing.
Trait 1 - I Was Highly Emotional
I have always been what I call a “big feeler”, a sensitive person who experiences their thoughts and emotions in a very physical way. I’ve felt like this since I can remember and often joke that I had my teenage years from about 5-8 because my emotions were so explosive! I felt a lot of anger, frustration and regularly had tantrums.
What I really lacked through my childhood and teens was a process to express and let go of these emotions in a constructive way. And so, food became a comfort blanket for when I wanted to soothe or try and block out those big, uncomfortable feelings.
My First Binge In a Tesco Toilet
When I turned 16, I decided that I wanted to lose some weight. Puberty had happened and I wasn’t feeling so great about the new curves around my tummy, hips and thighs. I didn’t go on a particularly strict or extreme diet, I simply decided that I wasn’t going to eat so many treats; mostly cake, crisps, chocolate and biscuits.
And so I didn’t. My mum even supported me by creating “the jar” - a special jar where £1 would be placed at the end of each day that I didn’t eat a treat - and I was going for those £6-£7 weeks!
I can’t even remember if I particularly lost much weight at this time. I do however remember thinking about food a lot more, and the feeling of tension that came with all of the self-judgements around food and my body.
I was a prefect at school and one of the benefits of this role was being allowed to leave the gates at lunchtime. My friends and I often went to Tesco and one day, when we were walking back, the urge to eat something sweet and “off-limits” became too much that it took over me.
I told my friends that I had forgotten to get something that my mum had asked for from Tesco, and that I was going to go back alone and get it. I could feel a real sense of urgency as I quickly walked back, and when I arrived at the supermarket, I went straight to the bakery section.
I didn’t think about it, I just picked up two bags of cookies (those really delicious Tesco Finest triple chocolate ones) hoping that no one else from school would see me. I paid for them. I walked into the ladies toilets. I locked myself in a cubicle and I binge ate all 8 cookies in a rush of desperation.
This brought on a huge sense of relief, but as soon as I finished that last cookie, all the feelings of guilt and shame came rushing in. I felt like I had been really bad - that I had acted like a criminal. And so I hid the evidence in the toilet bin, quickly got back to school, and told myself that I had to do better, that I had to eat less to make up for what had just happened.
But really, this was just the very start of it.
From Bingeing To Bulimia
My binges continued in this way for about three years until I left home. I would feel insecure about my body and so limit what and how much I ate, only to then binge whenever I was alone and could get food.
At 19 I moved to London to follow my dreams of working within the music industry and actually did what I’d consider to be “ordered eating” (the opposite of “disordered eating”) for those first couple of months. I enjoyed my new freedom of going to the supermarket and making what I wanted when I wanted, and I naturally lost some weight.
However, pretty quickly the stress of working within this industry got to me, and I turned back to food. After 9 months of becoming more anxious and my overall wellbeing dwindling, I decided that I wasn’t cut out for the music industry and left my job. This was a really low point for me because I was leaving behind what I thought I wanted for the last 5 years. I felt like I had failed and I had no idea what I’d do next.
My self-worth was bruised and a part of me felt that if I got my body to finally look a certain way, then I’d feel happy.
At this point, I was binge eating a lot to numb out the emotional discomfort and to combat that I restricted what I ate throughout the day. This became a vicious cycle of not eating much during the day and having huge evening binges when I was alone. Because my weight was still going up, I felt I had to do something more, and so I started taking laxatives in the evenings before going out for a run.
I disguised running as being all about my health and fitness when in reality there was nothing healthy about what I was doing to myself. Really, I was stuffed full of 4-5 days worth of food, laxative cramps kicking in and running until my fitness watch said I’d hit a certain amount of miles or calories burnt.
A Wake-Up Call
That went on for about a year. What really struck me about this period of my life was that for a small window, I was noticeably slimmer and would get comments from friends and family saying “how well I looked” and complimenting me on my weight loss. On one hand, this was the validation that I was after all along, but on the other, I was anything but “well” and didn’t feel I could tell anyone.
I had a few scary evenings where after bingeing and taking laxatives, I was lying on my bedroom floor in so much pain that it felt like an organ was going to burst or fail.
I knew that if something like this did happen, I’d have to call myself an ambulance and explain to them what I had done to myself. That felt too shameful, and I thought that if it came to that, I’d rather let myself die. It seems dramatic to write now, but back then, it’s where I was at.
This realisation, as well as my knees being in pain constantly from pounding the London streets, I stopped taking laxatives and I stopped running.
By this time, I had also enrolled on a visual merchandising diploma and was starting to feel excited about my future again.
But The Bingeing Didn’t Stop There
At 22, I had finished my year of studies and got a really great job straight away. However, I was having regular panic attacks and got diagnosed with a chronic anxiety disorder. I was given anti-depressants, which I ended up coming on and off 3 times because I didn’t like how I felt numb to life when on them. I was also bingeing as much as ever and feeling the pressures of my body to be slim, especially now working in the fashion industry.
Over the course of the next few years, I got serious about dieting, or as I would call it, just “being good”. I did Weight Watchers a couple of times, fell into the world of clean eating and developed orthorexia (an unhealthy focus on only eating healthy foods). I followed exercise plans, did juice cleanses, apple fasts, intermittent fasting, drank detox teas and everything else that was popular at the time.
I also weighed myself most days, kept a notebook of all of my body’s measurements and took countless “before and after” photos.
During this whole time, I was still bingeing and my weight fluctuated a fair amount. There were brief moments where I was a UK size 10 (where I wanted to be), but mostly, I moved between a size 12 and 16.
It wasn’t all bad though!
A period of huge personal growth
When I was 27, Mark and I left our jobs and London to go travelling in S.E. Asia for 6 months. This definitely brought on a lot of personal growth for me, especially when it came to food and bingeing. By this time, I had been vegan for 2 years and finding food that wasn’t just rice and a few veggies at times was challenging. And because Mark and I were together pretty much all of the time, I couldn’t have those secret binges.
My last month overseas was in Bali doing my yoga teacher training. This was a beautiful experience that amplified my growth and when I returned to London, I was excited to begin teaching yoga.
Although my relationship with my body was far more compassionate by now; I had let go of food restrictions, stopped weighing myself and moved my body for the sake of feeling good, I still felt insecure.
I felt now that I was a yoga teacher, there was a whole new expectation placed upon me of what my body should look like and be able to do. Part of me also hoped that practising and teaching yoga a lot would help me to just “fix” the last of my bingeing, or that it would lead me to lose weight.
Finally saying goodbye to binge eating
At 28 I had been binge eating for 12 years and was so, so ready to let go of the last of my eating disorder. By this stage, it was mostly habitual and any sense of relief or comfort that it used to provide wasn’t really there anymore.
I wanted help with these final steps, someone to tell me where I was still stuck or going wrong. And what I really wanted was help from someone who specialises in binge eating - either a coach, a counsellor or a therapist. I knew that getting help privately would mean me having to ask my family for help with paying for it and I didn’t want to do that. Not because I was worried about asking for financial help so much, but because I’d have to be open about my experience, which I’d mostly kept to myself.
Instead, I decided to go to my GP in the hope of getting referred to someone who could help. And this too made me feel incredibly vulnerable, but I went and sat in tears as I told my doctor everything.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get what I needed from that appointment. My doctor didn’t even acknowledge the reason I went. She sent me for blood tests and when they came back, another doctor I spoke to said there was nothing about binge eating on the notes made from my appointment.
And honestly, that made me feel crap. To open up in that way after all of this time to someone who you believe will help you, to then not even be heard, feels really invalidating.
So, I decided that I had to help myself. That I had to now do everything I could to end my binge eating once and for all.
Some last thoughts
This isn’t how I wish to have recovered. I wish that I had gone and got the help that I needed many years ago. But, I am very happy to be in a place now that if it wasn’t for my work as a binge eating coach, I wouldn’t really think about binge eating at all. It’s no longer a part of my everyday experience and it feels so good to be able to write that!
What has been even better is discovering and embracing more of who I am at the core; allowing myself to be more me (not a version I hope will be more likeable) and fully enjoying the things I love.
I really hope that you have gotten something useful from reading this. Maybe it’s knowing that you’re not alone in your experience. Or perhaps seeing that it is absolutely possible to recover from binge eating, no matter how much a part of you it may feel right now.
If I can recover, so can you.
I am sending you so much love and wish you all the best in your own recovery.
