The mental health campaigner reveals how her binge eating replaced alcoholism, and talks about her early menopause
In the dead of night, journalist Bryony Gordon would sneak down to the kitchen to binge on chorizo, beef jerky and bags of crisps, hiding the evidence from her family and waking up with terrible food hangovers.
She had replaced one addiction with another, developing a binge-eating disorder which eventually caused her as much pain as her previous alcoholic benders.
“I was two-and-a-half years sober [she gave up booze in 2017] when the pandemic hit and I was so relieved that I wasn’t drinking, as I would have literally killed myself with alcohol in the first lockdown,” she reflects.
“I didn’t recognise that I had fallen headfirst into this other addiction.”
The binge-eating disorder, which lasted just under a year, escalated into her raiding the kitchen bin for scraps from dinner, she recalls, out of sight of her husband, financial journalist Harry Wilson, and their daughter Edie, then seven.
She charts the episode and other changes in her life in her latest book, Mad Woman, a follow-up to her bestselling Mad Girl, published in 2016, which focused on living with mental illness.
Today, the mental health campaigner and columnist, who over the years has suffered from depression, OCD, bulimia and drug dependency, says: “Recovering from an eating disorder is, weirdly, far harder than recovering from alcoholism. None of us essentially need alcohol to live, but we do need food,” she continues. “You can abstain from alcohol, you can cut it out, whereas with food you have to eat three times a day.
“There’s a great phrase which a lot of eating disorder experts use, which is, ‘Eating is like having to take a tiger out for a walk three times a day’. I certainly found that.”
The new addiction crept up on her, she recalls.
“In the second lockdown, I became aware that I was stuck in this habit that felt similar to the last days of my drinking. It was about numbing myself with food. It wasn’t about what I weighed.”
Bryony found a therapist who specialised in eating disorders. To wean herself off the binge-eating cycle, she had to plan to make sure she didn’t get hungry, and that she ate dinner with her daughter at 5.30pm. She also re-educated herself to think that no food is “bad”.
Bryony also spoke about it on social media, and had flurries of messages from people sharing their similar experiences.
“People don’t recognise it as an eating disorder, they think it’s just slovenliness, they think it’s a failure on their part as humans, but it’s not – it is a clinical thing.”
She has long been banging the drum for body positivity and raising awareness of mental health issues, as the founder of Mental Health Mates, an initiative where people can connect through 150 UK walks.
She has run the London Marathon twice – once in her underwear – and in 2022, she ran 10 x 10km runs in 10 days to raise awareness of mental health and positive body image.
In April, she’ll run the Brighton Marathon, and then run the 70 miles from Brighton to London over two weeks, followed by the London Marathon, raising funds for Mental Health Mates.
“A lot has happened in the last 10 years and my views on mental health changed a lot,” she explains, not always with a “happy ever after” scenario. Bryony is now 43 and has grappled with early menopause, hormonal imbalances that sent her spiralling downwards, and several health scares.
She thinks she will always be on antidepressants – she’s been on them since she was 17 – because “they are difficult to come off ”. She also sees a therapist and still does 12-steps work, which helps with alcohol addiction. Her hormones explain much about her mental state, she agrees.
“Over lockdown, I had quite an early menopause and it really screwed with my mental health. I was quite stunned. You think you know all about depression, mental illness, OCD, and then something else comes along and reminds you that you don’t.”
She was finally able to see how much her mental health issues had been exacerbated by her hormones and how no one had thought to explore it. “I probably had PMDD (Premenstrual dysphoric disorder) for the whole of my life, and that has had a bounce back on my inability to know what it was and to think it was a failure of me, instead of knowing it was a hormonal condition.”
When she went on HRT – which she still takes – Bryony found she was intolerant to progesterone, a hormone the body produces. She says knowing that her mental health troughs might be hormonal is a relief.
“I was in such self-loathing of myself. I couldn’t comprehend that this might be complex, like a chemical or biological process.”
It was as a result of a greater spotlight on the menopause, aided by the work done by TV presenter Davina Mccall, that Bryony got herself checked out.
“Ten years ago, I would have just thought I was losing my mind. I think about Davina and I think, she did inadvertently save my life. I sent her a message the other day to tell her.”
Bryony says she’s happier now than she’s ever been.
“The stuff with the menopause, or perimenopause, was really hard, but it was like a wake-up call to deal with this stuff, because I didn’t want to be miserable for the next 40 years. I think of it as a big cosmic reset.”
Today, her relationship with food is a world away from her binge-eating disorder period. Her fridge houses chicken breasts, milk, cheese and eggs, and the chorizo she once hoarded, and hid, has gone.
“Naturally we just avoid carbs,” she says. “We’re like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have carbs’, but they are so important, especially with women going through the menopause. I remember this therapist saying to me, ‘It’s OK for you to have a pizza for dinner’.
“I plan [meals] but I like to look forward to it,” she continues. “My attitude towards food has changed quite a lot. It’s about nourishing me, looking after my body, as opposed to punishing myself.”
■■Mad Woman by Bryony Gordon is published by Headline and is out now