On The Road to Recovery: Binge Eating Disorder

This is a personal story from someone with lived experience of binge eating disorder through their childhood and adolescence.

I remember being around eight to nine years old and beginning to develop binge eating disorder symptoms. It was at a challenging point in my life when my parents split up and then when I went to secondary school, things got worse as I had more control over what I was eating. My self-esteem was impacted by bullying in school and people around me giving me their uninvited opinions about my body and what I should be eating. The dinner lady used to say that I was not allowed to have any dessert and people would tell me I did not have an eating disorder because I was fat. All of this would lead to me going home and binging more, to a point where I was living to eat rather than eating to live.

Looking back now...

I realise how much a lack of education and understanding in people around me such as my parents meant they were adding to the cycle in a negative way. There is a lot of stigma around eating disorders in general and there needs to be more of an understanding that they come in different forms and the focus should not just be on one type of eating disorder.

I found that therapy helped me understand that it was not about eating more or less food, but around eating mindfully. It also helped me understand the emotions of those around me and their behaviours, as well as how managing my own emotions was important for both me and them. Having people close to me with lived experience of eating disorders also made a difference to my experience of recovery.

Turning eighteen was an important moment for me as I knew I needed to commit to getting better. I found out more about myself in terms of other diagnoses which felt validating after a long time of self-advocating. I found out that I had BPD which helped me begin to understand why I was more prone to impulsivity which was impacting my binge eating. I also found out that I had PCOS, which I had suspected for some time, but not been taken seriously. After lots of deliberation, I also decided to have bariatric surgery. There is a lot of shame around having surgery when you have a binge eating disorder, it being seen as the ‘easy way out’. My perception of it on the other side of surgery is quite different – I have continued to struggle with body dysmorphic, had to overcome a fixation with weight loss and manage many of the post-surgery symptoms which mirrored my binge eating symptoms.

I need to constantly remind myself in this recovery process that it is the things I do that make the most difference to my happiness, not the way I look or what I weigh. Putting myself down has never helped, it is about starting to love my body and giving it what it needs to be healthy. I’ve learnt that my body, just like everyone else’s, changes every day – sometimes even throughout the day and that this is okay. I’ve come to accept that food is my addiction but it is not something that I can cut out of my life – it’s something I need to develop and maintain a healthy relationship in order to live happily.