Eating My Feelings, Starving My Sanity

Food is essential. It’s something we need to survive, and something we get pleasure from—but when every bite has a value attached to it, it can be hard to find a balance. My relationship with food has swung violently back-and-forth between extremes. Moderation and balance have always felt impossible, like something achieved only by those with intense willpower and self-discipline. There have been times when starvation felt like the only way to take control, the hunger itself almost intoxicating. And then there were the days when I drowned in indulgence, numbing myself by bingeing an entire confectionery aisle just to silence the chaos in my head.

I’ve been a fussy eater for as long as I can remember. Strong flavours, strange textures, anything that felt ‘wrong’ in my mouth—I avoided it all. My palate was limited to safe, familiar foods; I would have been happy eating the same thing every day, but my mum did her best to introduce variety. Looking back, I now realise this was likely a symptom of my (at the time) undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. Even as an adult, my preference for bland, boring foods remains, and people have always made me feel like that somehow inconveniences or disappoints them, casting negative judgement on me for it. People would often pull the classic “How will you know if you don’t try?” nonsense—well, spoiler alert: I know. Their reactions would make me feel like I was being difficult, like my preferences weren’t as valid as anyone else’s. It was exhausting, isolating, and completely unnecessary. I’d rather prepare my own food and eat alone. The frustrating thing is, I wasn’t even that bad compared to some kids. I wasn’t a ‘chicken nuggets and chips’ kid—I loved vegetables, salads and fruit. I was active too, constantly moving, whether it was gymnastics, badminton, cycling, or rollerblading. But none of that seemed to matter.

As I entered my teens and life became more difficult, I found comfort in the fleeting pleasure of confectionery. Sometimes, eating a piece of cake after dinner was the only moment of happiness I felt all day. It’s like I was creating a mental association between sweets and positive feelings. It’s easy to see how this could quickly lead to having another piece of cake, and then another, and so on, just to keep the positive feelings coming. Paired with a lack of physical activity (beyond walking to and from school), my weight started increasing.

I don’t think I was ever medically overweight, but I was chunky, and I hated how I looked in photos or the mirror. I wanted to hide away from other people because of how grotesque I looked. What I struggled with most was my face. I felt like my neck and lower face puffed out, making my face look round and swollen, like a balloon. My rib cage also seemed more prominent than other boys my age, and I despised how my school uniform clung to my body, exaggerating the shape. I’d look at other people with similar builds and wonder how they carried their weight so well, while mine seemed to settle in all the wrong places. I became hyper-aware of my posture, constantly holding my shoulders in an awkward, unnatural way to minimise the way my body looked. Over time, that unconscious habit left lasting damage, and now, as an adult, I live with the pain it caused.

After Christmas 2004, during my first year of college, something in my head just clicked. Out of nowhere, I found this sudden, almost obsessive motivation to change myself. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I know I started drastically reducing how much I ate. I became fixated on foods with the lowest fat content, convinced that eating fat meant becoming fat. I also ramped up my physical activity—walking home from college and doing bursts of cardio at home. At first, I never intended to stop eating completely, but looking back, I can only describe it like an addiction. I became addicted to not eating, so I needed to keep stepping it up so that I continued to see the desired results. Hunger became something I craved. That empty, growling feeling in my stomach wasn’t discomfort—it was success. I loved that I could knock on my hip bone or collarbone and hear a hollow tap, rather than it being softened by a layer of fat. The numbers on the weighing scale became my scoreboard, my measure of achievement. Each drop in weight fuelled me to push harder, to aim for even lower numbers. It became a game, a challenge—to see how far I could take it, how much thinner I could get.

Eventually, my BMI fell into the ‘underweight’ category. I saw this as an achievement, that my hard work was paying off. I still wanted to push further, because there were categories beyond ‘underweight’ that felt within my grasp. My mum was terrified. She told me I looked like a skeleton, begged me to see a doctor, to get help. But I refused. To me, she was overreacting; I was in control. I felt good. I felt confident in myself for the first time in my life. I didn’t want anyone interfering or trying to stop me from reaching my potential.

That summer, in July 2005, we went to Belfast, and I had a full-on meltdown in a Chinese restaurant at the Odyssey. My parents were trying to force me to eat, and I just couldn’t. The idea of putting food with mystery ingredients in my body filled me with panic. In the end, just to get them off my back, I ordered a side portion of boiled rice as my main meal—then barely touched it, eating only a few grains.

I did see doctors during this time, but I’ve never been good at advocating for myself, and they never noticed a problem. Maybe because I didn’t look severely underweight to them—despite my BMI saying otherwise—they never took me seriously when talking about my weight loss, and any questions seemed more directed to my knowledge of my body’s nutritional needs rather than my psychological needs. Anything that should have been a cause for concern was seemingly brushed aside, overlooked, irrelevant. Perhaps because I was a man, I don’t know. If there was any silver lining to looking skeletal, it was that I finally had proof: my ribcage was unnaturally prominent. It wasn’t just a fat kid’s excuse to explain away his manboobs, or the old “I’m big boned” defence.

When I met my partner in December 2005, things started to shift. I remember him literally forcing a burger into my mouth at one point. It was traumatic. But over time, I started reintroducing food again. Gradually, I gained weight—not too much, not too fast, and I still felt like I had some level of control. For the next five years, I yo-yoed between restriction and indulgence, but I could pull myself back when I needed to.

I have memories from that time that seem almost absurd now. Sitting at work with nothing but a handful of crackers or a tin of sweetcorn, knowing that was all I’d allow myself to eat that day. And yet, in the same job, I also remember devouring four slices of Sayers carrot cake in one sitting at my desk. I guess my relationship with food was still broken, but at least, back then, I felt like I could rein it in when I needed to.

That is, until I quit smoking in 2012 and replaced nicotine with biscuits. I got chunky again. Fast. Not helped by being back on medication that made it super easy to gain weight. After years of obsessively policing every bite—and seeing eating as failing—it felt easier to just eat what I wanted rather than constantly trying to compensate for it later. I needed something to enjoy, some kind of treat to make life feel a little less bleak. By this point, my mental health was still in a rough place, and chronic pain had already taken hold. I no longer had the energy to care about my physical health—it was just another battle I didn’t have the strength to fight. But food? Food was easy. Junk food, especially. It gave me comfort when nothing else did. I even tried to channel my love for it into something productive: baking. But the problem was, I just kept eating everything I made.

Then, in 2014, something in my brain clicked again, and I found that magic trigger—the one that let me do something about my appearance. I started by ‘detoxing’ with lemon water, convinced it was flushing the addictive substances—mainly sugar—out of my system. Maybe it was a placebo, I don’t know. But it worked, despite having to also battle the weight gain side effects of my medication. This time, I committed to a paleo lifestyle—eating like a caveman, avoiding anything processed or unnatural. I boiled chicken breasts and ate them like Cheestrings. I refused to have full meals—I considered that to be eating for the sake of eating—and instead snacked in tiny, controlled portions throughout the day.

In just three months, I lost over 30kg by being brutally strict with myself, cutting out almost all carbohydrates and increasing protein. I remember my GP weighing me (for reasons unrelated to my relationship with food), raising her eyebrows, and commenting on how extreme that amount of weight loss was in such a short time. And that was it. No further concern, no deeper questions. Looking back, I don’t understand why that was the extent of her care—why she didn’t connect the dots, why she didn’t recognise the pattern. Because, in hindsight, she absolutely should have, especially having been my GP since childhood. There was clearly something wrong.

I started to really miss the simple pleasures I’d cut out—sweets, chocolates, cakes. The cravings gnawed at me, so I tried to compromise. I set Saturdays as my ‘treat day,’ allowing myself to buy whatever I’d been longing for all week. At first, it worked. I could indulge on Saturday and snap straight back into strict mode on Sunday. But gradually, Saturday started merging into Sunday. Then Monday. Then Tuesday. Before I knew it, the discipline I’d fought so hard for was slipping through my fingers, and I couldn’t get a grip on it again.

On top of that, my body started punishing me for trying to eat normally again. Whenever I had heavy carbohydrates—potatoes, bread, anything starchy—I’d get this unbearable pain in my chest. Once, it got so bad I booked an emergency doctor’s appointment, convinced something was seriously wrong. But all I got was a casual dismissal and a prescription for co-codamol. No answers, no concern. Just “take some painkillers and go home”. I felt brushed off. As I often do at the doctors. The pain eventually disappeared, but I never did find out what it was. My best guess? After cutting out carbs for so long, my body had stopped producing whatever enzyme it needed to break them down. And when I suddenly reintroduced them, my system couldn’t handle it.

So, once again, I was well on my way to being a fat bastard. And this time, I leaned into it. If I was going to eat junk, what was the point in eating healthy meals too? That was just extra food I didn’t need. So, I started swapping proper meals for chocolate bars, biscuits—whatever I fancied. At that point, I didn’t care about nutrition. I didn’t care about health. Mentally, I was in the gutter, and curling up in bed with my favourite sweets was one of the few things that still brought me any kind of comfort.

In April 2024, I found the magic trigger again. This time, I decided that if sugar was the addictive substance, I’d cut that out first. I tried so hard, using non-sweet treats to get me through the initial cold turkey period. I’d get ridiculously frustrated seeing sugar needlessly added to supermarket products—why does everything have to contain sugar? Cutting it out worked for a while—and certainly put me on the right path—but then I gradually started cutting out everything. Meals became cucumber slices and oat crackers. I convinced myself that drinking kefir might somehow ‘fix’ my metabolism. And before I knew it, I was addicted to weight loss again. The numbers on the scale dropped, my reflection became slightly more bearable to look at, and that was all the motivation I needed to keep going. By September, I’d lost 35kg.

By then I was also starting to lose my control. The cravings started creeping back in, and I gave in to the idea of ‘treat days’ again. Except, like before, they didn’t stay as days for long. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t eating because I wanted the food—I was shovelling it in just because it was a treat day, because I had to make the most of it and get all the urges out of my system. I didn’t even get to savour or enjoy them.

And then came the next ‘solution’. If I had to eat all this junk, but didn’t want to deal with the weight gain, why not just get rid of it afterwards? Eat it so fast that my body rejects it before it even has a chance to process it. One morning at 7am, I planned for this. I went to Tesco and bought food waste bags, a 12-pack of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, a two-pack of vanilla slices, two cupcakes, a bag of Candy Kittens, a four-pack of Milkybar, and a four-pack of Rice Krispie Squares. I demolished everything in about 20 minutes. The pain was unbearable. I felt sick, my stomach was stretched beyond its limits, and I sat there with a lined bucket, trying to make myself throw up. But I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t happen. The gag reflex method did nothing but make me cough. I sobbed, convinced that after that much food, it should have been impossible not to throw it back up. But my body wouldn’t comply. I had to sit with the pain, forced to digest every bit. In my frustration, I then harmed myself in my usual ways, punishing myself for being this ridiculous person.

I’ve tried to do this again since. Still no success. I’ve even investigated ways to medically induce vomiting, like ingesting poison or pills. Why do some people find this so easy? Why can’t I? I need this.

And as time goes on, the binges are happening more and more, and my control is slipping further out of reach. It’s terrifying. Even a bite of a carrot can trigger the overwhelming urge to binge, to eat everything in sight. I feel like a heroin addict clawing for the last scraps of a fix. I even try to hold off my first food of the day until late at night, just to shorten the window available for binging before bed—which is the only thing that seems to interrupt the urges. But I know not eating regularly is bad for my metabolism, so this isn’t sustainable. This is why even on days when I consume very little, I’m not seeing the weight loss I would expect to see. It’s tormenting, working so hard and living off rabbit food, to then seeing a weight gain on the scales the next day, instead of a well-deserved loss.

I can’t let all my hard work last year be for nothing. I can’t be fat again. I have to find a way to get back on track, to be in control again. I want to be normal—to have three balanced meals a day without constantly wanting more. To be able to say no without feeling seduced by treats. There must be help out there for people like me, like there is for other addicts. Because that’s basically what this is, right? It’s an addiction. Both extremes. Addicted to starvation and addicted to eating.

This week, I finally asked for professional help, because I’m scared I’m going to ruin my hard work losing weight from last year. I spoke to an empathetic male doctor. He said my experience (which was highly summarised to fit into a GP appointment) sounds consistent with an eating disorder and seemed genuinely surprised that there was zero mention of this on my file(!), despite my insistence that I’ve spoken about my struggles with food and weight over the years. It made me feel a bit like I was making it up for attention, to be honest, when it’s just that I’m bad at fighting for my needs and asking for help. I’m certain it has been mentioned in various reports when I’ve been discharged from psychology, but apparently, none of it made it onto my record.

The next step is an ECG and blood tests to rule out any underlying causes for the bingeing, and then I’ll be referred to an eating disorder clinic. I have no idea what that will involve, but I hope it helps me keep the weight off. I desperately hope it’s more than just a lesson in nutrition—I know what I should be eating. My struggle isn’t knowledge. It’s stopping the cravings. It’s stopping myself.

Wish me luck.