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‘I thought I was comfort eating’
Bryony Gordon’s struggle with binge eating disorder
‘I ordered double burgers from Deliveroo in the middle of thenight
She has suffered from bulimia in the past, but thought her eating disorder was well behind her. So when, under the stress of lockdown, writer and mental-health campaigner Bryony Gordon began consuming snacks until she felt ill, she didn’t realise she had developed a different, yet just as serious, condition – and one that is on the rise
I told myself it was comfort eating – but I was bingeing’
It was always worse at night. During the day, I could somehow maintain the illusion that I ate like a normal person – or the version of a normal person I saw on Instagram. A banana here and there. Some smashed avocado on a piece of sourdough bread. A salad full of nuts, seeds and other superfoods. But when the lights went out, and everyone in the house was asleep, it was as if some shameful switch had been flicked. I would start eating, and I would only stop when everything snackable had gone. It was savoury food, mostly. Crisps, crackers, cheese… even raw cooking chorizo, if that was what was required. I don’t have a sweet tooth, but if there was chocolate around, I wouldn’t want it to feel left out, so that would usually be devoured too.
Thousands of calories would pass my lips in a matter of minutes. It didn’t matter if I felt full, because the point of these binges was to eventually pass to a place of not feeling anything at all. I’d hide the wrappings in a bin bag within the bin bag, and remind myself to laugh off these nutritional excesses if my husband noticed the missing food the next morning. Then, only then, would I have reached the trance-like state of nirvana that was required for me to drift off to sleep. A numbed-out state of semi-consciousness that silenced the endless conversations in my head.
It’s such a cliché, isn’t it? The person creeping into the dark kitchen, lit up only by the faint bulb of the fridge. Such a cliché that, in the early months of that first lockdown, I told myself it was normal. It would have been weirder, given the stresses of homeschooling and working, if I hadn’t needed to lose myself in something. I was bingeing, sure, but at least I wasn’t purging, which is what I had done in my teens and 20s, all the food I consumed quickly regurgitated in the bathroom, with the taps on to drown out the sound of my retching. Without that part, I could convince myself that what I was doing was OK. That I was well. I was not back in the bulimia; I was simply comfort eating. Of course, the shame I felt the next morning, not to mention the stomach pains, reminded me a little of the last days of my drinking. A little… but, I reassured myself, not a lot – there was no disappearing for 12 hours, no falling down stairs, no talking absolute cobblers and upsetting my husband.
And the pain of that rock bottom, which ultimately led to rehab in 2017, meant that I could somehow dismiss the shame I felt about the way I had started to eat in lockdown. I mean, give a girl a break – especially a girl who hasn’t drunk a drop of booze for several years. While everyone else was drinking away the stresses of the pandemic – I seemed to read a different story each week about soaring alcohol use – I, a sober, recovering alcoholic, was instead relying on the contents of the fridge.
My history of alcoholism and addiction meant I could pass the eating off as something harmless by comparison. Did it matter that I was throwing myself at cheese and onion crisps given some of the states I used to find myself in? If that was the worst I was doing, then shouldn’t I just go easy on myself ?
It amazes me, how strong the forces of denial can be, even when you’ve spent three months in rehab and told the world about the seedier consequences of your alcoholism. How incredibly powerful our brains are at pulling the wool over our own eyes.
But it was the knowledge I had gained in recovery from alcoholism that eventually, thankfully, allowed me to call out this denial and admit that I needed help with the way I used food. Because try as I might to look for the differences between my eating and my drinking, increasingly, all I could see was the similarities – the self-loathing, the physical hangovers from overdoing it, the knowledge that I didn’t want to behave like this any more, but that I was completely powerless to stop myself from behaving like this any more.
There was, however, one big difference that I could see between alcoholism and overeating, and it was this: while I didn’t need to drink booze to live, I did need to eat food to live. Abstinence was not an option. So what could I do? Put myself on a diet? I tried a bit of that, but they rarely worked for more than a few weeks before the desire to binge returned, stronger than before. And as a naturally larger woman who had done a lot of work to fight the pernicious message that a woman’s worth is found in her weight, diets didn’t sit comfortably with me. I didn’t want a ‘solution’ that made me look acceptable. I wanted one that made me feel acceptable.
The universe sends you exactly what you need. In the early autumn, as I researched my book No Such Thing as Normal – a practical mental-health guide – I found myself having conversations with experts to glean information on how people could best access mentalhealth provision. I spoke to GPS, psychotherapists, social workers, psychosis specialists and, eventually, people who worked in the field of eating disorders. Beat, the eating
disorders charity, arranged for me to have a conversation with their clinical lead, Jess Griffiths. ‘I don’t know much about eating disorders,’ I began our conversation, and immediately I realised those words were a lie. There was still a gap at the back of my mouth from where a tooth had fallen out in my mid20s, a result of the enamel being destroyed by my bulimia. And that morning, I had woken up from a burger binge in the dead of night – I had ordered two doubles on Deliveroo and waited at the door for the rider so that he wouldn’t knock and wake everyone up.
Jess talked me through treatment for anorexia and bulimia, and then she started to tell me about binge eating disorder (BED). Something inside me shifted. I didn’t know that the condition, in which sufferers experience a loss of control and overeat, even existed – I had simply assumed I was greedy, lazy and a glutton. I realised my face was wet with tears. ‘I think I might have that,’ I said, before I could stop myself. The words were out of my mouth, and now there was no going back. ‘Do you think you might be able to help me?’
Iwas reluctant to write this piece at first. The fact that I had succumbed to yet another mental-health issue felt like a failure. But then I remembered this is how mental-health issues want you to feel – they gaslight you and tell you that you are being ridiculous. And the shame I felt was not a reason to stay quiet – in fact, it was a reason to write about it. Plus, if I have learnt anything over the past few years, it is that mental health is not an absolute. If you didn’t develop healthy and resilient coping mechanisms as a child, you can’t expect to suddenly do so in adulthood. It was only three years since I had sobered up. I would not have been the first alcoholic in recovery to feel as if they were playing whack-a-mole with their addictions, and I wouldn’t be the last. And I realised that it wasn’t just alcoholics who experience BED. When I mentioned on Instagram that I was having treatment for the condition, my inbox was flooded with messages from people asking to know more. People who, like me, had grown up in a world that saw regular overeating as a moral failure, rather than the serious mental illness it can be.
Disrupted routines and increased stress as a result of the pandemic have contributed to a rise in binge eating in the UK. In January this year, Beat found there was a 195 per cent increase in numbers attending their online support groups and a 173 per cent jump in helpline calls, compared to February 2020, which was their last ‘normal’ month.
I need to be clear here – there is a difference between BED and occasionally raiding the freezer in the hope of finding comfort at the bottom of a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. As Beat clarifies on its website: ‘BED is not about choosing to eat large portions, nor are people who suffer from it just “overindulging” – far from being enjoyable, binges are very distressing, often involving a much larger amount of food than someone would want to eat. People may find it difficult to stop during a binge even if they want to. Characteristics of a binge-eating episode can include eating much faster than normal, eating until feeling uncomfortably full, eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry, eating alone through embarrassment at the amount being eaten, and feelings of disgust, shame or guilt during or after the binge. Binges may be planned like a ritual and can involve the person buying “special” binge foods, or they may be more spontaneous. People may go to extreme lengths to access food – for example, eating food that has been thrown away or stealing food. Binge eating usually takes place in private, though the person may eat regular meals outside their binges. People with BED may also restrict their diet or put in certain rules around food – this can also lead to them binge eating due to hunger and feelings of deprivation. People often have feelings of guilt and disgust at their lack of control
‘I didn’t know the condition existed. I simply assumed I was greedy’