Discomfort Food: The Eating Disorder No One Wants to Talk About

The most personal thing I've ever published. Here goes...

Me at about 18, in the eye of the storm.

Important Disclaimer and CW: I’m talking about eating disorders, from a personal and societally inaccurate angle. It’s not intended to reflect all individual experiences, or prioritise one ED over another. If you’re not feeling up to potentially triggering content, feel free to come back to it another day with my warmest wishes. H xo

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Last year, I reached out repeatedly to find entertainment professionals with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) who were willing to discuss it for an article. Contributions could be anonymous, but the few who did respond ultimately decided they couldn’t see it through, for reasons I entirely understand. I am a fellow silent sufferer, and have been for decades. I’m writing openly about it now - feeling the fear as I do so - not because I expect a tidal shift in how bingeing disorders are portrayed and understood, but hoping it’s relatable for those who can’t talk about it, and encourages compassionate conversations.

There have been countless nights over the past twenty years when I've binged on large quantities of comfort food in a short period of time and paid an excruciating price hours later. Torn out of sleep at 3am, hacking and clawing for air. My windpipe scalded by stomach acid coughed into my nose, guts wrung out like a washcloth. Three hours in the bathroom chugging Gaviscon and ice water, wondering why I keep doing this to myself.

Like other eating disorders, BED has serious health risks, but despite an estimated 2.8 million adults affected in the United States alone, it's easily overlooked and dismissed. With 2/3 of them classified as overweight or obese, they experience the same prejudice and stigma larger bodied people do in general, without recognition or appropriate support. 

In fact, at the peak of my disorder I didn't know BED even existed (it was added to DSM - V as late as 2013), so it never occured to me to get help. Those I spoke to who tried were simply referred to diet plans and told to exercise. Medical professionals couldn't seem to separate specific, triggered episodes of disordered eating from a stereotypical overeater with no self control. 

As a young performing arts student in my teens, disordered eating was positively glorified - as long as you were thin, of course. It was subtle, drip fed and implied through what we saw, heard and were taught, but the semantics were unmistakable. Denial was disciplined, dedicated, professional. Sacrifice brought success. Gratification was self-indulgent, gluttonous and decidedly unattractive. So eww they made it a deadly sin in the 4th century.

In reality, disordered bingeing has little to do with poor discipline, hunger or greed. It’s a habitual addiction, often with an emotional or psychological trigger, serving a momentary spike of dopamine followed by shame and regret. It's unhelpful for autists like myself that common ‘safe foods’ and textures cross over with common binge foods, the dread of infantilisation driving our habits further underground.

While some binge eaters struggle to identify a root cause, I know when mine began. I was bullied every day at school from a young age - that sly, psychological brand of cruelty girls inflict on a weak link. On Fridays, when a torturous week of insults and isolation was over, my sister and I got a pound each to spend at the corner shop across the road. All the treats cost 1-10p in the nineties, and we clutched the coins in our little fists, giddy with possibilities. 

When I got older, mum took us to the grocery store instead for weekend treats. I always got the same thing - a big bag of chipsticks, a packet of strawberry fizzy laces, and a diet soda. My ‘magic recipe’ as I called it - a sugary, salty cloak of protection. I devoured them over the two day ceasefire, but the stomach-churning Sunday nights came around like clockwork. Sometimes there'd be a Friday evening at Granny’s, with her open treat tin and home made puddings. A pavlovian link quickly cemented itself - if I can just get to Friday, I can make it all go away for a little while with a sweet reward from someone who cares about me. 

Drama school in the era of Kate Moss, pencil thin eyebrows and America’s Next Top Model turned childhood soothing into adolescent body dysmorphia. Getting measured for costumes was a humiliating ordeal of yanking and tutting, my breasts and hips making me a constant nuisance. I’d smash an end of term audition, and more often than not a competent, willowy classmate would get the lead. As the dancers took to strolling around with Slimfast shakes in hand and skipping lunch, the singers and actors followed suit. I saw firsthand the especially intense critique and peer pressure the dancers faced, but I felt like the failure. I thought, tragic and untrue as it was, that if I'm just a chubby character actress, the fat lady singing, what does it matter? I might as well feel better with a bag full of snacks in a remote toilet cubicle.

I developed CPTSD in my early twenties after a series of traumatic events, and my reliance on soothing foods became full blown substance addiction. When I couldn't let my pain out, I put comfort in. When the world was savage, I poured on sweetness and softened cruelty with cream. I needed oblivion, a perpetual analgesia, and I stuck to the vice I knew best, that felt like home, like love.

It was one stressful Christmas on my own in COVID lockdown, scooping After Eight mints into double cream like tortillas, when I started typing my behaviours into Google. 

To my surprise I realised I’d almost certainly crossed over into bulimia in my twenties, that there are actually different types of purging beyond the post-binge vomiting we all immediately think of. I realised how reliant I’d been on prescriptive portrayals in cartoons, school videos, magazines, TV dramas and movies, even as someone training and then working in some of those fields.

Bingeing receives clumsy treatment on screen in particular. It’s not administered with a dirty needle, clutched in a crumpled paper bag, cut up with a gold card, or knocked back by a suit on Madison Avenue. We consume those addiction archetypes episode after episode. There's an edgy, raw recklessness to it. The excessive consumption of food is relegated to jolly, grotesque comedic characters, wheeled out for moral cautionary tales, or feverish cries for help from waiflike heroines who ‘could do with a good feed anyway’.

I think of Emma Corrin shovelling pudding from a dainty glass in the palace fridge as a young and desperate Princess Diana in The Crown. Slender, fragile, eyes closed in momentary relief before she throws up behind a closed door, audible but hidden from view. Teen favourite Center Stage, where a homely ballet student is expelled for not managing her weight, and the boney, brittle prodigy starving herself to succeed has the fortitude (and screen time) to change her fate. 

There’s Brendan Fraser bloated, broken and housebound in The Whale; a perfectly average sized Bridget Jones scoffing ice cream and swigging wine while constantly body shamed; and a pungent, portly Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids using a stuffed sandwich the size of an anaconda as toe-curling, ribald foreplay. Even childhood books by the likes of Roald Dahl, adapted by Hollywood, punish, mock and vilify gluttonous children.

Not to mention growing up with the mindfucking juxtaposition of Special K and Weight Watchers adverts alongside catchy slogans encouraging frivolous indulgence. Remember ‘Once you pop, you can’t stop’, or more recently, mates yodelling inanely for Dominos pizza, and a tower block of cheerful residents ordering a mass delivery from McDonald’s? 

Polishing off an entire packet of biscuits or refusing to share a big bag of crisps is a relatable and sociable human foible apparently, not something smuggled up to your bedroom or wolfed down in the kitchen while everyone’s asleep. Cigarettes are hidden by opaque sliding doors behind supermarket counters, but junk food is cheap and prominent. The fast food industry relies on and cultivates addiction, and society condemns us when it succeeds.

For a while the viral Korean mukbang videos on social media were inescapable, typically featuring petite Asian women devouring incredulous quantities of food, bowl after bowl. But according to one source, this is often a sideshow construction:

“Muckbangers, however, have been exposed spitting out the food they seemingly consume while also editing those parts out in the videos, so that they don't have to eat all those unhealthy large meals all in one go, for real.”

This masticating montage positions anorexia and bulimia as the noble afflictions of ballet dancers and models - a badge of discipline, a flagellation at the altar of elegance and artistry. Sexy, gritty box office bait. But to swallow, absorb and digest is a lazy, sloppy white flag. The truth is, wherever we crouched on the spectrum, my peers and I were set up to fail.

I'm sorry to say that as I approach my forties, I'm still wandering in the wilderness, chasing that Friday night sweetness when life gets sour. There are things that keep me on the wagon for a while, but I know I still have old, nervous knots to unpick. Fortunately, by summoning the courage to write this piece and opening up to those close to me, there are fresh hands laid upon them, loving them a little looser. Reach out your hand, even a fingertip, and feel kind flesh press back.

If you would like more information or support on eating disorders, Beat is a helpful place to start. Much love.

If this piece speaks to you, please take a moment to hit the heart button or let me know your thoughts in a comment - it helps me bring you more of what you like. H xo