Opinion: I battled for years with an eating disorder

My illness started in my mid-teens, around the time I was doing my GCSEs.

I didn’t realise that I was getting sick at the time, I just felt that controlling what, how and when I ate became vitally important.

It was only when I was in my early 20s that I realised that my obsessive focus on controlling my eating had taken over my life and it suddenly occurred to me that I was mentally ill.

That was when I looked up eating disorder symptoms and realised that, contrary to the stereotype, boys and men get eating disorders, not just teenage girls.

I now know that my eating disorder had started as a way of responding to stress.

People who suffer from them often describe eating disorders as a coping mechanism, something that numbs out intense or painful feelings.

Feeling as though I was in control of my eating gave me a high, made me feel powerful and like I’d achieved something.

It gave me a relief from other worries like exams, loneliness, low self-esteem and a looming dread of climate change.

Like an addiction, it quickly developed a momentum of its own and under its power I stopped seeing friends, I withdrew from my family, I lost my sense of spontaneity and of fun.

That was partly because of the shame I felt in being seen eating (so many social interactions revolve around food, but they became increasingly difficult for me).

More deeply though, it was because the obsessive circular train of my eating disorder thoughts, planning how I would restrict or when I would binge, took up almost all the space in my head and left me with little or no space or time for anything or anyone else.

Sometimes it feels like the 10 years when my illness was at its worst are a blank in my life because my thoughts were so dominated by the disorder that I had no space for living.

Having initially had anorexia, I developed a form of bulimia that involved excessive exercise to purge my binges, and then binge eating disorder (this is quite a common progression of the illnesses; bulimia and binge eating disorder are actually far more common than anorexia and tend to develop in people’s early or mid 20s).

To give a sense of how much irrational behaviour my illnesses drove me to: feeling the desperate need to binge, I have stolen food and eaten food out of bins and from pets’ bowls.

Working as a waiter in a pub, I stuffed the scraps from customers’ plates into my pockets, and later my mouth, then ran home to try and purge.

I carry a crippling sense of shame about some of the things I have done under the compulsion of my eating disorder. So why am I writing about it now?

Firstly, because eating disorder rates are rising sharply in Norfolk: eating disorder referrals for children and young people in Norfolk have doubled during the Covid pandemic, and acute referrals have tripled. I am worried for other people who may be developing these horrific illnesses.

As a Norfolk county councillor, I have been calling for more action to help people at risk of or with eating disorders, along with other councillors from all parties.

In particular, there needs to be more awareness of the warning signs, for example among GPs, and there needs to be better and faster referrals processes for people who are ill but do not fit the criteria of being under a certain BMI.

Secondly, I want people who may be suffering to know that they are not alone – especially men. I was extremely lucky in finding the resources offered by the charity Beat, which helped me understand my illness and that some of the behaviours that I thought were too disgusting for anyone else to know about were reasonably common as symptoms of eating disorders.

That helped me get into treatment.

Even more lucky for me, last year one of my close friends told me that she too had had bulimia, and has recovered.

It took her 24 years to get better, but she’s shown me that recovery is possible, and has been helping me on the same path.

Even though I still have days where I struggle, I am learning that eating can be a normal as well as a necessary activity for me. Others deserve that same support and hope.