Binge eating is the hardest addiction to beat
After a lifetime blighted by compulsive eating, Kate thought she’d beaten it — only to relapse again. Here she explains why ...
One afternoon at the end of July, I had to admit to myself that I had relapsed into addiction. I was alone in my house, surrounded by t he detritus t hat proved once again I was in the grip of my drug of choice. Yet there were no empty alcohol bottles or used needles. The evidence of my dirty little secret was a pile of food wrappers.
In the preceding 90 minutes I had eaten four crusty bread rolls, thickly buttered and crammed with chicken and avocado, six cereal bars and two bars of Green & Black’s chocolate: more than 4,000 calories at a conservative estimate, quite apart from the normal dinner I would eat later. I felt happily stupefied and — my absolutely favourite sensation — nauseous.
nor was it a one-off. I had done something similar the previous day, the day before that, the day before that . . . and almost every day for the preceding month.
My ritual has never included throwing up. I eat to reach a particular point way beyond full (though this kind of eating has nothing to do with being hungry in the first place), but never to overflowing. I like to get to the stage where it feels as if the edge has been taken off everything, so I can slump somewhere comfortable, feeling fuzzy and warm.
But that stage is brutally brief. I know what comes next — the self-disgust that I’ve done it again.
The shame of being locked into this lonely cycle of bizarre behaviour. The knowledge that I can’t tell anyone, because a key element of bingeing is the secrecy.
Only one thing provides any balm for all that misery . . . another binge, on more cake and biscuits and chocolate. So I do it again. And again.
Spiralling down into the vortex of despair, where I spent 34 years from the age of eight.
nine years ago, at 42, I climbed out of that vortex. I managed to work out what triggered this strange compulsion at primary school age and get a grip on it.
I lost the four stone I had gained by following three rules — eat less, move around more and don’t lie to yourself. It took two years, but I eventually settled at the weight I was in early adulthood, around 9st 12lb.
The weight, however, is just the manifestation of the problem. Far more importantly, for almost a decade I achieved food sobriety.
People hooked on alcohol or narcotics have a mountain to climb, but at least there is a clear-cut solution — avoid drink or drugs at all costs. Replicating that model with food addiction has fatal consequences.
Instead you have to find a way to live
alongside your problem and manage it. You have to understand your own eating patterns, so the compulsive thoughts that once governed your days are kept at bay.
For all recovering bingers, two rules apply. The first is the need to put as much time as possible between yourself and the last time you binged — because if I binge today, the urge to do it tomorrow and the next day and every day will be all-consuming.
The second is never to eat anything in secret. Secrecy is a prison of shame. Alcoholics Anonymous has a phrase for it: ‘Secrets keep you sick.’ For someone like me, who is single and lives alone, food sobriety means a l ot of self-policing.
I can eat a piece of cake, a couple of biscuits or some chocolate if I am offered it outside my home by others, because that’s ordinary social behaviour. I can have a big meal in the company of others. That, too, is normal.
It’s when I’m alone that I have to watch it. So I can never buy cake, biscuits or confectionery myself. Not even a cereal bar, because I can’t stop at one. If I eat one, I’ll buy more and eat them all straight away.
I can never buy multipacks of food because I’ll eat everything immediately. And bread is best avoided, because eight slices of toast is an easy snack.
I can’t eat in my car because that was once a favourite bingeing place. Often I’d eat the huge amounts of food I bought on the brief drive home from the supermarket.
FOR nine years I followed the rules of food sobriety. Yet here I was at 51, overwhelmed by the hideous instincts again, powerless to do anything but binge. If it all sounds like plain old greed, self-indulgently dressed up as an illness, clinical evidence states otherwise. The National Centre for Eating Disorders says the number of people with binge eating disorder (BED) — the frequent and overwhelming desire to eat very large quantities in a short space of time, without stopping or making yourself sick — is equal to the combined total of all those with anorexia or bulimia.
Beat, the UK’s leading charity supporting those affected by eating disorders, agrees.
It reported in February that more than 725,000 people in this country are affected by an eating disorder. Beat’s website quotes the latest edition of the Diagnostic Statistic Manual Of Mental Disorders (DSM) — the standard classification of mental disorders — which cites the three main eating disorders as anorexia, bulimia and BED.
Just 10 per cent are anorexic and 40 per cent are bulimic, meaning that more than 360,000 people in the UK have BED.
But the National Centre for Eating Disorders believes the total number affected could be much greater.
‘One person in two who seeks help f or their weight problem eats compulsively,’ states the NCED.
‘Put another way, about 12 million people i n the UK suffer f rom compulsive eating to some extent.’
Yet still so many people have not heard of it. Clearly, that perpetuates the secrecy around it.
Others may notice your inevitable weight gain, but they have no idea of the complexity behind it and are too polite to mention your expanding girth.
And I know from personal experience that any attempt at a halting confession is greeted with wellmeaning incomprehension, simply because the listener has never heard of the compulsions you’re describing. Well- i ntended kindness i s their instinctive response.
So if you find the courage to confide in someone the shameful insanity of your situation and describe how the urge to binge fills your every thought, they offer sympathetic reassurance that they, too, have been known to eat half a packet of Jaffa cakes in the course of a day. It doesn’t really seem an option to reply that, in your case, three boxes of Jaffa cakes are disposed of within 20 minutes.
I can remember bingeeating at eight years old, i mmediately establishing the classic pattern — buying massive quantities of (in my case) chocolate, smuggling it into the house, then eating it very fast, always in secret and never with any instinct to purge (vomit).
At eight, you don’t ask yourself why you feel the need to behave in this way. I did later, of course, as the syndrome continued into adulthood.
But I never could understand why I did it. I just needed to reach that point again, where sweet waves of sickness lulled me into comfort. I didn’t know it for many years, but research shows that eating large quantities of fat and sugar has a sedative effect on the body.
For compulsive ov er- eaters like me, it triggers the release of serotonin, a naturally occurring chemical i n the body associated with well-being and happiness.
On and on it went. My 17-year relationship with my former husband had no effect on my eating either way. I was far too accomplished at the necessary secrecy for him to pierce my wall of silence.
Somehow, it was not until my early 30s that any weight gain gathered rapid pace. I was 13st 10lb and aged 42 when, three months after a move from London to Berkshire, it dawned on me that I was not experiencing the imperative to binge.
Previously I’d been able to stop only for a month here and there, always in the certain knowledge that ultimately it would engulf me again. But as a result of the house move, and without me even trying, a way to exit bingeing had been found.
In Berkshire, where I still live, I developed a wonderful circle of close, local friends, which for me had a significance I would only come to understand a few months later. Meanwhile, I managed to stop bingeing for six months and eat pretty much like other people. I began to formulate my set of rules to help me stick to food sobriety. Best of all, for the first time, it no longer seemed inevitable that I would return to bingeing. It f elt as i f the sun had come out after years of rain. One evening I was talking with a friend. We were reflecting that my childhood had been unhappily isolated, with hardly any friends.
I was thinking vaguely about occasional agony aunt columns I had read over the years, which said bingers eat to fill emotional emptiness. I had never been able to relate fully to that. It was a catch-all explanation, missing some crucial factor I could never quite place. Suddenly I knew what it was and why I had begun bingeing. As a largely friendless child, food became my friend. The one I could always turn to for comfort. The one who was always there when I needed it.
And this summer, for the first time in a decade, suddenly I needed it again.
Lying on the sofa in July, my mind was filled with one word: ‘Why?’ Then my gaze fell on a photograph across the room. It was me with Tam O’Shanter, my cocker spaniel, who died in March, just shy of his 14th birthday. I had my answer. The desolation prompted by the death of an animal is not understood by everyone. In the nine years since I stopped bingeing, I have experienced divorce and the deaths of my parents. Obviously these are huge life events, but I was able to stay food sober throughout them. I have no pat explanation for why Tam’s loss was too much by comparison. During all these events, friends were hugely kind. But you can lean on friends only so much.
By June I was still crying every day, grateful that summer made the wearing of sunglasses normal. I can only repeat the words of roy Hattersley on the death of his dog Buster five years ago: ‘Nothing has ever caused me as much pain.’ Yet I was lucky this time. That sudden understanding of why I had relapsed helped me to free myself once more from the cycle of shame.
Four months on I am food sober again, following the rules. The 10 lb I gained is coming off, swapped for inexpressible relief.
And last month, quite unexpectedly, I was asked to give a home to an eight-year-old West Highland terrier whose elderly owner had died.
The Westie’s name is Lily. She is noisy and funny and great, and she is sleeping at my feet as I write this.
Meanwhile, a lack of awareness about BED persists. Think of it this way: how many of your friends or family have had anorexia or bulimia? A couple? More?
It is extremely likely an equal number are locked in the secret prison of bingeing.
Since I stopped bingeing I’d survived bereavement and divorce. But the death of my dog tipped me back over the edge