I ate to feel safe but food started to control my life (2024)

For years, I thought that there was something very wrong with me.

I ate whether I was hungry or not and I had lots of rules around food. I’d often feel completely out of control around food, would eat until I was uncomfortably full and then feel full of guilt and shame.I felt disgusted by my body.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing the symptoms of Binge Eating Disorder (BED), something that I developed aged 15, shortly after my dad died.

There were only five months between my dad’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and his passing. It was a very painful, intense experience.

One day, I got home from school and immediately had to call for an ambulance for my dad. As the paramedics drove him and my mum off to , my brother and I sat on the edge of the sofa watching.

My dad’s death meant that I quickly transitioned from being a young teenager into a 15-year-old pseudo-adult, supporting my mum and brother emotionally while grieving myself.

I found safety in food. It felt like a warm comfort blanket, the support system I didn’t have, through this very challenging period of my life.

The food, I would later discover, was acting like medicine, depressing all of the intense and highly activating sensations of stress that I was experiencing. It enabled me to become numb.

One evening, I was sitting on the sofa watching TV and all I could think about was how much I wanted to order a pizza – and at the same time, how much I absolutely did not want to.

But once that craving was there, there was nothing that would take my mind off it, other than to eat it, and I sat in fear: I knew that I would ‘pay for it later’ and be on the receiving end of intense, verbal abuse – from myself.

Worried that the pizza wasn’t going to be enough, I ran to the newsagents and came home with three bags of crisps and a couple bars of chocolate.

I rapidly ate two bags and when the pizza arrived, I dove straight in, drowning every bite in a thick layer of garlic mayo.

At the start of a binge, there’d always be a voice that tried to caution me into only eating a couple of slices, but very quickly, my body switched onto auto-pilot.

I kept eating and eating and eating. The world started to slow down around me, my belly felt full and heavy. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t, as though I wanted to get as much food in me as quickly as possible. Mybody felt numb. The empty void filled. Everything felt a little bit warm and fuzzy.

Shortly afterwards, the guilt and the shame kicked in. Deeply disgusted by my own behaviour, I tore myself apart.

There was a part of me that felt deeply hurt and upset, but the only way I knew how to respond was with food. I spent the rest of the evening eating chocolate.

My biggest binge episodes often happened on the sofa, usually in the evening, but bingeing was only oneof my challenging behaviours.

Entire weeks were ruined by what my scales read. My mood was influenced by a brief glance in the mirror. I hyper fixated on certain body parts, like my belly, arms and legs, disgusted by them and wishing they were different.

There were days that I restricted my food intakeso much that I would later just stand at the fridge and eat anything and everything as quickly as I could. My body, my survival response eating for me, because I was so hungry.

By the time I was 21, I had spent a fortune trying to heal from binge eating, acquiring a lot of debt in the process. I tried every diet out there, from veganism, keto, raw food and everything in between.

I read all the books, signed up for intuitive eating programmes, bought fancy supplements and ingredients. I went for colonic irrigation and took part in intensive Ayurvedic retreats.

I tried CBT, mindfulness and counselling. I even went to physiotherapy because I thought the pain in my back was stopping me from exercising and losing weight. (This was peak desperation)

Some things brought light relief for a bit, sometimes my willpower and restraint lasted longer, but in the end, nothing worked.

Eventually, I found a brilliant psychologist with whom I began to work through a lot of the experiences that had followed my dad’s death. I started to learn about the huge, emotional responsibilityI’d taken on supporting my mum and my brother, and how I’d felt alone with nobody there to check on me.

I built a lot of compassion for myself and my relationship with food started to improve but I still didn’t feel the complete ease and freedom that I wanted to and it still felt like there was some food noise, despite being able to ignore it.

While my eating patterns improved a lot after working with a psychologist, there were still places that I didn’t feel completely free, and so I began working with a somatic therapist, whose practice centres around the body. It felt like the missing piece. I finally started to feel fully in control of my choices and for the first time in my life, I felt empowered in my body and around food.

I moved from a very shame-based relationship with myself to one of deep love and compassion.

My capacity to be with my emotions and intense sensations grew, and slowly I understood how to support myself without depending on food.

I discovered how to identify when my body was entering into states of activation and survival – which were the precursor signals to binges – and I learned how to sit with them without using food to suppress them. Now, I know how to nourish myself and find safety beyond food.

Healing from binge eating has meant allowing all parts of me to exist, and giving tender love to the parts of me that felt unbelievable pain. Pain still passes by, but I know how to let it be alive inside me without swallowing it back down with food.

If you are experiencing patterns of binge and/or emotional eating, whether it’s connected to grief or not, it’s important to know that it has never really been about the food.

It’s always a response to what you are feeling within. In fact, binge eating is a very normal response to extremely difficult experiences that you have had to endure. Itdoesn’t make you wrong, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure – it just makes you human.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.

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