[ad_1]

I have always thought of the word ‘binge’ as denoting a very British kind of guilty pleasure. A bit naughty, but a bit fun, too. Binge drinking. Binge watching. Binge eating. The kind of thing we know we ‘shouldn’t’ do, but we allow ourselves to do as life’s too short.

And why would the universe create vodka, Netflix and crisps if it didn’t want us to ­consume them in large quantities?

Now, however, the word ‘binge’ has developed a more sinister meaning to me. One that has more in common with addiction.

As an alcoholic in recovery, there is an ever-so-thin line between bingeing on something for fun, and being addicted to it out of ­necessity. And with food, I have well and truly crossed that line.

By day, I am a respectable mental health campaigner, the founder of a national peer-support group called Mental Health Mates. People look to me for wise counsel on the bin fire of addiction, OCD and depression that seems to have turned me into some kind of sage. My inbox and my social media boil over with messages from people telling me about their problems.

'As an alcoholic in recovery, there is an ever-so-thin line between bingeing on something for fun, and being addicted to it out of ­necessity. And with food, I have well and truly crossed that line'

‘As an alcoholic in recovery, there is an ever-so-thin line between bingeing on something for fun, and being addicted to it out of ­necessity. And with food, I have well and truly crossed that line’ 

These messages mean a lot to me. But they also, inadvertently, remind me of what a fraud I am. A weak, gluttonous, 40-year-old fraud who is incapable of practising what she preaches. One who spends her nights out of her mind eating chorizo.

Very specifically, Sainsbury’s own-brand cooking chorizo at 2am. None of that posh artisan stuff for me. Not when it costs as much as gold, and I’m ­eating as much of it as I do.

I tend to wash down a couple of packets of the raw chorizo with a couple of packets of beef jerky.

My husband, Harry, has started buying beef jerky because he says it is high in protein, which he needs for the intensive exercise routine he has taken up.

As I inhale another packet, I wonder, when I am going to become the kind of person who uses intensive exercise routines to cope with things.

On top of this, I feel an added layer of shame about the type of food I can’t stop eating. Why couldn’t it be raw broccoli, or raw carrots? Why coarsely chopped pork with paprika and garlic?

I know that, deep down, I am a bad person. I can sort of ignore my inherent badness during the day because I am too busy — with work and my seven-year-old daughter, Edie — to dwell on it.

But in bed late at night, upstairs in our South London home, it starts to eat me alive. I toss and turn, unable to sleep as the ­badness sweeps through me, fizzing through every cell in my body.

A few years ago, I would have anaesthetised myself with booze. But I can’t do that now and so, instead, I eat.

I creep downstairs, where the only light comes from the timer on the microwave. I kneel in front of the cupboard, find the jerky and then make my way to the fridge, where I locate the packets of cooking chorizo where I have hidden them, deep at the bottom of the vegetable drawer that nobody ever looks in.

I feel a swell of relief as my fingers close around the plastic packet. Then I tiptoe into the living room and, in the dark, I eat. I eat and I eat, until there are threads of chorizo stuck in my teeth and my throat is dry from all the salt in the jerky and I feel suitably sedated.

Then I put the wrappers in a plastic bag and hide them down the back of the sofa, from where I will retrieve them tomorrow, when nobody is looking, on my way out to replace Harry’s jerky.

Cross-addiction, or ‘addiction transfer’, is when you swap one addiction for another. It is different from dual addiction, which is when someone has more than one addiction at the same time.

Cross addictions include sex, food, gambling, gaming and ­shopping. It is very common in people in early sobriety. And I am so relieved that I have been free of booze and drugs for more than three years, that I don’t seem to realise I have fallen face-down into my original addiction: food.

Fresh battle: Bryony has beaten booze but moved on to food

Fresh battle: Bryony has beaten booze but moved on to food

Long before cocaine, ale and beer and Cava and bad men and Marlboro Golds, there were Herta frankfurters. You know the ones: thin, beige, vacuum-packed into plastic, with that weird bit of water at the bottom. What was that water? It doesn’t matter. Yum. Some children get told off for ­eating too many sweets, but that wasn’t an option for me.

I had learned that eating sweet things was a crime, one punishable with any of the horrible diets to which my mother and her friends subjected themselves: the cabbage soup diet; the cottage cheese diet; the grapefruit diet; and so on and so forth until you wasted away to some arbitrary size. Here, then, was the first sign that I had been born an addict: my cravings already thought they could outsmart the society around them.

Sometimes, my fantasies about Herta frankfurters were such that, while playing in my bedroom with my Sylvanian Families animal characters, I could almost hear the uncooked sausages calling to me from the kitchen — ‘Eat us, Bryony!’ — and I would be forced to sneak downstairs and peer into the fridge, where I would pretend I was looking for apple juice if anybody happened to catch me.

Once, my mother found two empty Herta frankfurter packets hidden under my bed, where they had obviously started to smell.

‘What on earth are these doing in your bedroom?’ she questioned, as if she had found actual drugs. I felt adrenaline course through me. At that moment, our labrador, Polo, leapt at the empty packets.

‘I don’t know, maybe blame him!’ I started to cry, already able to manipulate the situation like a master addict.

My mother held me in her arms, while she dabbed away my tears. ‘I wasn’t telling you off, darling,’ she said. I snuggled into her and, for the first time in my life, I felt the blessed addict’s relief of getting away with something.

‘A worrier’: that was how my mum described me. But I now know that I was more than just a worrier. I was really unwell, in an almost permanent state of terror. Nothing about my upbringing could explain my mental illness. There was nothing that was done to me, nothing I had experienced, that might have caused me to be so troubled.

My parents appeared happy; they loved us; we had a ­comfortable life in a comfortable house; I went to a private school; there was a Volvo estate and wholesome ­holidays in Cornwall.

And yet, despite all this, I knew there was something not quite right with me. I felt odd. I felt, somehow, mad.

This, I have learned, is how ­mental illness thrives: by isolating you. By making you feel like a freak. By telling you that nobody else in the world is thinking what you’re thinking. I had yet to ­discover that, actually, quite a lot of people were thinking what I was thinking. I just thought I was bad.

There were many ways in which I tried to change my feeling of ­otherness. I tried to change it with the obsessive chanting and ­rumination of OCD that I believed would prove I wasn’t bad. I tried to change it with drink and drugs. And I tried to change it with bulimia.

I was 19 the first time I threw up a meal on purpose. Here was the answer to my shameful love of food: I would simply sneak off after eating it, and force it out of my system.

I saw thinness as a goal. As a way to make people like me more. If I looked good on the outside, then surely I would not feel so bad on the inside.

Eating disorders are not really about weight, as we all know — they are about control. And I had no control whatsoever.

Bryony says she saw thinness as a goal - as a way to make people like her more

Bryony says she saw thinness as a goal – as a way to make people like her more

As I got older, my pudgy hands tore through frankfurters, pork pies and scotch eggs like tissue paper. I would eat yards of pizza in one sitting. And if I felt sick, then I might as well be sick.

But the problem with living like this is that after a while — a while being many, many years — it starts to take its toll. Your teeth begin to fall out. Your throat begins to feel like sandpaper. Your skin gets ­sallow. Your soul begins to call out to you, asking you to stop.

So I did. When people ask me why I stopped being bulimic, I tell them the truth: because I wanted to start living. I got angry that this was how I was expected to live my life, in a perpetual state of self-loathing.

I stopped bingeing and purging. I put on weight. I ran a marathon in my pants. I started posting unfiltered pictures of myself on Instagram, ones that showed off my cellulite rather than hiding it.

I became an accidental ­ambassador for body acceptance. I had a child; I started eating ­normally; I stopped drinking and taking drugs; I became a lot more self-accepting. But mostly, I got fed up. It wasn’t so much that I suddenly felt great all the time, more that I became tired of feeling bad all the time.

Until the morning when I wake with a familiar and shocking feeling, one I have not had for the 1,191 days I’ve been sober. I have a hangover. It’s just that this time, it’s a food hangover. My head is fuzzy, my throat is drier than the Gobi desert, my body is leaden.

I prop myself up in bed and become aware that I am soaked through with sweat. My nightie is sodden. There is a horribly sweet, decaying smell in the air, and I realise it is coming from me.

Instead of my husband lying in bed next to me, there are two empty packets of pork scratchings, one bright-green tube of sour cream and onion Pringles and eight packets of Hula Hoops.

The memory of lying to Harry hits me in the stomach. It has been a long time since I fibbed to my husband in order to fuel an addiction. I used to lie to him so I could drink more — ‘I’m just going to stay downstairs and clean up!’ I would trill as he went to bed.

But last night, I lied to him so I could eat more. ‘I think I’ve got a cold coming on,’ I remember ­telling him, making the ‘helpful’ suggestion that he should go and sleep in the spare room so as not to ‘catch’ it.

I remember creeping downstairs and opening the fridge, only to be met with the crushing disappointment that there was no chorizo. I was furious with myself. Could it have been that just that morning, I had really and truly believed that I wasn’t going to binge again?

I stared forlornly into the ­practically empty chasm. It ­contained: a jar of mustard, half a pint of milk, a carton of apple juice, a piece of plastic cheese that had been there since a barbecue in the summer of 2019, some uncooked salmon (I have always drawn a line at raw fish, as if I am some sort of civilised human being) and two ageing carrots.

I grabbed the plastic cheese and moved to the cupboard.

The sight of the Pringles left me feeling as high as any line of cocaine. I would have let out a whoop, were it not for the fact that I was a 40-year-old woman lost in the depths of a tragic food spiral while her daughter and husband slumbered quietly upstairs.

Then I saw the Hula Hoops and the pork scratchings. I shoved the items up my nightie and tiptoed back upstairs.

The rest of the night was an ­endless cycle of eating and ­numbing and shame. When I ran out of the food from the cupboard, I started thinking about the food in the bin. The soggy, half-eaten fish finger my daughter couldn’t finish, the fat trimmed from my husband’s steak.

I crept back downstairs, placed my foot on the pedal and reached inside. It was at this point, I think, that I entered blackout.

And so it is that I find myself learning how to eat properly again. I now have regular therapy to help me to understand why I binge and a food diary app on my phone.

I can eat whatever I want — no food is banned — I just need to eat appropriate amounts of it.

And I don’t like it. I find it hard to eat regularly, and ‘normally’. As an alcoholic, it’s like being asked, every day, to only have two glasses of wine and leave it at that.

I don’t like eating ‘normally’, but I will do it. I will do it, because I’ve done this before. I’ve tackled my problems. I’ve done it with OCD. I’ve done it with alcoholism. And I will do it with binge eating.

I have to. Because what other choice is there?

Mad Woman by Bryony Gordon (£20, Headline), published on February 15.

© Bryony Gordon 2024.

To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 29/02/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

[ad_2]

Post sourceDaily mail

You May Also Like

Honey can help kids who’ve swallowed a button battery

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Button batteries are commonly used in many electronic…

Charlie Sheen and Julia Stambler don moustache disguises

[ad_1] He was recently reported to have embraced a vegan diet, at…

Olly Alexander health: It’s A Sin star opens up about his mental health struggles

An advocate for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), Olly Alexander is…

Success Stories: James | Daily Mail Online

[ad_1]   James, 58  James loves his five-a-side footie, but a health…