It is the last day of 2019, and I have never been happier. Me, Bryony Gordon, self-confessed alcoholic, professional f—k-up, dunderheaded depressive. And despite all of this – because of all of this, perhaps – I am on cloud nine, or, more accurately, in Phuket, sitting by a pool, staring out at the Andaman Sea, about to see in the new year in the most heavenly place.
On one side, my husband Harry dozes on his sun lounger, sated after a lunch of tuna tartare. On the other, my six-year-old daughter plays with her LOL dolls. I feel a tear drop down my own cheek – a happy one.
For the first time in my life, I am going into a new decade feeling hopeful and happy. Like nothing could go wrong…
A few weeks after we return, my husband comes home from work and announces that we are on the brink of a pandemic. He says it as if he is telling me that his boss has been mildly annoying that day. ‘That’s nice,’ I reply, hanging up wet washing to dry. ‘Do you think there’s also going to be a time when we will get a tumble dryer? Because our home looks like a Victorian laundry.’
Weeks pass. The country starts to panic, to stockpile loo roll. Harry says that this is the first time he has seen me calmer than everyone else. ‘You’re behaving like a f—king Keep Calm and Carry On poster,’ he mutters, when rumours swirl about a lockdown. ‘I’m just not sure how much help it would be for me to have a breakdown right now,’ I say.
But if there is one teeny-tiny, absolutely minuscule way in which I am not fine, it is probably evidenced in the raw cooking chorizo I have started eating in bulk, in secret, at 2am. Very specifically, the Sainsbury’s own-brand raw cooking chorizo. 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 am.
I tend to wash it down with a couple of packets of beef jerky. My husband has started buying it because he says it is high in protein, which he needs thanks to the intensive exercise routine he has taken up. As I inhale another packet, I wonder when, exactly, I am going to become the kind of person who uses intensive exercise routines to cope with things.
On top of this shame, I feel an added layer of shame about the type of food I can’t stop eating. Some people go mad for Ben & Jerry’s. Others can’t resist a salt and vinegar crisp. But for me, only raw chorizo seems to hit the spot. Why couldn’t it be raw broccoli, or raw carrots? Why coarsely chopped pork with paprika and garlic?
There are a few things you can surmise from my strange eating habits. Primarily, that I am very much not fine. Rather, I am so busy trying to prove that I am fine that I clean forget to acknowledge that it would be perfectly… well, fine, to be a bit freaked out.
But it is not good to say this. So I clap for carers and bake banana bread and home-school my child and hang rainbows in my window, and I tell no one how I really feel – how badly I want to escape to the sea, alone – and I know that deep down inside, I am a bad person.
‘I had always thought of the word “binge” as denoting a very British kind of guilty pleasure’
Credit: Olivia Harris
I can sort of ignore my inherent badness during the day because I am busy. But in bed at night, it starts to eat me alive. I toss and turn as the badness sweeps through me, fizzing through my every cell.
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 to 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, my bounty clutched to my chest, and in the dark, I eat. I eat and 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 beef jerky.
I am fine.
Long before cocaine, before ale and beer and cava and bad men and Marlboro Golds, there were Herta frankfurters. You know the ones: long, thin, beige, chemically processed, 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 absolutely a crime, one punishable with any number 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 until you wasted away to some arbitrary size.
These diets were supplemented by Jane Fonda workout videos – ‘Go for the burn!’ commanded Jane, from the tiny, flickering box TV.
So I always knew that I was never going to get away with scoffing sweet things in the quantities my anxious brain craved. Here, then, was the first sign that I had been born an addict: my cravings already thought they could outsmart the society around them. I needed something else to fill the space in my stomach that I now see was actually the massive hole in my soul. And the thing that worked, in those early years, was the salty deliciousness of Herta frankfurters.
Sometimes, my fantasies about Herta frankfurters were such that while playing in my bedroom with my Sylvanian Families, I could almost hear the uncooked sausages calling to me from kitchen. ‘Eat us, Bryony!’ cried the little Herta frankfurters. ‘Eat us!’ And I would be forced to sneak downstairs, checking the coast was clear, and peer into the fridge, where I’d pretend I was looking for a carton of apple juice if anybody happened to catch me.
Bryony as a young girl
Once, my mother found two empty frankfurter packets hidden under my bed. They had obviously started to smell, causing her to carry out a huge search. ‘What on earth are these doing in your bedroom?’ she questioned, holding them up as if she had found actual drugs.
I felt adrenalin course through me. How was I going to get out of this one? At that moment, our Labrador, Polo, leapt at my mother and the empty frankfurter packets. ‘I don’t know, maybe blame him!’ I started to cry, already able to manipulate the situation like a master addict. ‘Why would I be hiding empty frankfurter packets in my bedroom? That’s gross!’
My mother held me in her arms, dabbed away at my tears. ‘I wasn’t telling you off, darling,’ she said. ‘Bad Polo, bad boy!’ I snuggled into her, and for the first time in my life, I felt the blessed addict’s relief of getting away with something.
What was I trying to change? What fears already had me in such a vice-like grip that I needed to eat cold, processed meat in an attempt to try and vanquish them? I could list the anxieties that plagued my childhood in the same way that other kids could list games they liked to play: the house could burn down and it would be all my fault for not raising the alarm in time; there could be a downpour of acid rain that would burn off all of our skin, and it would be all my fault for not alerting my family to the dangers of using products made from burning fossil fuels.
‘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. My parents appeared happy; they loved us; we had a comfortable life in a comfortable house; I went to a private school, where I was never bullied; there was a Volvo Estate; frequent wholesome holidays to Cornwall. And yet I knew there was something not quite right with me. I felt odd. I felt other.
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. Faulty. Wrong.
There were many ways, over the years, in which I tried to change my feeling of otherness, of being wrong. 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 the drink and drugs. And I tried to change it with bulimia.
I was 19 the first time I threw up a meal on purpose. At the time, I did not feel that I had developed an eating disorder, more that I had discovered a delicious secret. Here was the answer to my shameful love of food: after eating it, I’d simply force it all out of my system.
Eating disorders are not really about weight, as we all know – they are about control. And I had no control whatsoever, quite clearly.
As I got older, my pudgy hands tore through frankfurters, pork pies and scotch eggs. I would eat yards of pizza in one sitting, my attempts to numb out giving rise only to a terrible feeling of nausea. And if I felt sick, I reasoned, then I might as well be sick. It made sense. If I forced my finger down my throat and purged, I would be able to right all the wrongs in my world.
So my addiction to strange food was joined by an addiction to vomiting up that strange food. And as with all addictions, I had rules. When it came to my alcoholism, I would refuse to drink wine because it caused me to black out too quickly (clearly wine was the problem, rather than the speed at which I drank it). With bulimia, I could not wait for longer than 10 minutes to purge – this being some arbitrary cut-off I had created after which point all the calories would be absorbed into my body.
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. But mostly, your soul begins to call out, asking you to stop.
By 21, Bryony was in the grip of bulimia
So I did. When people ask me why I stopped being bulimic, and why I stopped hiding my body away, I tell them the truth: I stopped 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 gave up trying to shrink myself and fleshed out to the size-18 woman I firmly believe had been struggling to get out of my size-10 body all along. I started posting unfiltered pictures of myself on Instagram, ones that showed off my cellulite. I became an accidental ambassador for body positivity, though really the term I prefer is body acceptance.
I am asked all the time how I got my confidence. I wish I could distil my answer into a neat paragraph. But life doesn’t work like that. There is no simple answer: just that I had a child; I saw the magic of my body; I started eating normally; I stopped drinking and taking drugs; I discovered that exercise was about how it made me feel rather than how it made me look.
But mostly, I got fed up. I didn’t develop confidence, just a desire not to spend another moment of my precious life hating myself.
Almost exactly a year after our trip to Thailand, I wake with a familiar and shocking feeling, one I have not felt for the 1,191 days since I became sober.
I have a hangover. Only this time, it’s a food hangover.
The physical sensations are the same. My head is fuzzy, my throat is drier than the Gobi desert. The emotions, too, are startlingly similar: shame, regret, the sense that I can never, ever feel this way again. And, like a hangover caused by alcohol, there is a lag between me coming round and me piecing together the events that have led to this sense of dread.
I 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. I turn and see that instead of my husband lying in bed next to me, there are two empty packets of pork scratchings, one tube of sour cream and onion Pringles and eight packets of Hula Hoops. Not the strangest situation I have woken up in after a binge – it’s probably best I don’t get into the time a man tried to use a tub of Lurpak on me as a lubricant – but it’s up there.
The vague memory of lying to Harry hits me. I used to lie so I could drink more – ‘I’m just going to stay downstairs and clean up!’ I’d trill as he went to bed, painting a picture of me as some sort of Mary Poppins figure, when in fact I was more like Alan in The Hangover, ‘secretly’ hoovering up lines of cocaine and bottles of beer.
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 at midnight, making the ‘helpful’ suggestion that he should sleep in the spare room so as not to ‘catch’ it. He shuffled off and I felt the jolt of elation that was knowing I could eat whatever I wanted without the shame of being caught.
Bryony in 2013, with her mother, after she had given birth to her daughter
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. Just that morning I’d really and truly believed that I wasn’t going to binge again. In that state of complete delusion, I’d failed to go to Sainsbury’s and restock. And now I was standing in the cold, harsh light of the fridge, realising what an absolute ass that I’d been.
I scanned the fridge for other readily edible food but it was a practically empty chasm. It contained: a jar of mustard; half a pint of milk; a piece of plastic cheese that had been there since a barbecue we’d held in the summer of 2019; some uncooked salmon; a cucumber; some spinach; a courgette; two ageing carrots. The vegetables stared back at me, the equivalent of an alcoholic being offered a glass of water.
I grabbed the plastic cheese, then moved to the cupboard. The sight of the Pringles left me feeling as high as any line of cocaine. I took them, and the Hula Hoops and pork scratchings, and I shoved them up my nightie and tiptoed upstairs.
The rest of the night was a blur, 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 leftovers scraped from our plates a few hours earlier. The soggy, half-eaten fish finger my daughter couldn’t finish, the fat trimmed from Harry’s steak. I crept back downstairs, placed my foot on the pedal of the bin, and reached inside.
And it was at this point, I think, that I entered blackout.
I tell myself that it is just stress. That’s all this is. And it’s not as if I am throwing it up, so I can’t be that bad, can I? This delusion fuels me for a few hours. But then at 4pm, I am back to thinking about dinner. And snacks. And chorizo.
To complicate matters further, my husband is still on a health and fitness drive, lifting weights and concocting meals that involve lean protein and vegetables, like turkey balls with cauliflower ‘mash’.
Bryony with her husband and daughter in 2017
‘How about I make it tonight for both of us?’ he asks one day, and the idea fills me with such rage that I actually tell him to f—k off. ‘Why would I want that?! How can you suggest I go on a diet? If I wasn’t married to you, I’d cancel you!’
He doesn’t mention it again.
All of this coincides with writing a book, part of which is a guide to how to get emergency help when you’re in a mental health crisis. I interview GPs and psychotherapists for it. I also interview an expert on eating disorders called Naomi.
‘I don’t know much about eating disorders,’ I say to her, and I immediately realise this is a lie, one I am too ashamed to correct. Then I start asking her about signs and symptoms.
‘I should also say that while it’s important to focus on anorexia and bulimia, we shouldn’t forget that the most common eating disorder in the UK and US is actually binge eating disorder.’ Naomi pauses here, and I feel something strange pass through my whole body, something like clarity.
‘Is that when you binge food but you don’t purge?’ I ask.
‘Yes. People often think that if they aren’t purging or restricting their food, then they can’t have an eating disorder. But that’s not the case. Binge eating disorder involves consuming very large amounts of food without feeling as if you have any control. You can’t stop.
‘We don’t really hear about it enough. If you could mention it in the book, you’d be really helping us out.’
‘I think I can do that,’ I say, as tears fall down my cheeks.
I had 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. The kind of thing we know we ‘shouldn’t’ do, but we allow ourselves to do because life’s too short.
But in the coming weeks and months, I will learn that for me, 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.
Mad Woman: How To Survive a World That Thinks You’re the Problem is out on 15 February
Credit: Clara Molden/Clara Molden for The Daily Telegraph
‘I can’t believe there’s something else wrong with me,’ I tell my therapist, Peter. I laugh, as if performing some sort of comedy sketch. ‘From what you’ve said, Bryony, binge eating isn’t new to you.’ He looks so earnest, so unwilling to join me in my performance. ‘It sounds as if food was actually the first thing you ever got addicted to.’
Silence cloaks the room as I let that sink in.
‘Lots of people say that getting sober is like being handed the keys to the kingdom,’ Peter explains. ‘[But] the thing that made you pick up all that alcohol is still there, and that’s you. Without the booze to numb it, you suddenly have to deal with yourself…
‘You’re not the first alcoholic to go into recovery and spend the first few years cross-addicting with other substances. For some, it’s cigarettes. For others, it’s sex. For you, it’s food.’
‘Actually, Peter, it’s all three for me,’ I admit. ‘I still smoke like a trooper, and I shan’t go into all the masturbation that took place in the first year of my sobriety. So yes, I’m sober, and yet I’m behaving like a blind drunk.’
‘You’re here, acknowledging your problems,’ Peter replies. ‘That seems like progress.’
I reach out to Naomi again and ask for her help. Asking for help, as I have said many thousands of times before, is the first and arguably most important step towards getting better. Why, then, do I feel like such a massive bellend doing it?
When we speak, I find myself closing my eyes as I tell her I think I have binge eating disorder. After everything I’ve batted out of the way, it seems kind of idiotic to find myself felled by this.
‘Well, nobody feels clever for developing an eating disorder,’ says Naomi, not unreasonably. ‘The feeling of shame you have is a symptom of BED in itself.’
She explains that she can help me, in tandem with Peter, but for some reason, I’m embarrassed by this as well. It seems excessive. Who do I think I am? The Mariah bloody Carey of mental illness?
I mention this to one of my best friends, Holly, who I met in rehab. I tell her about the binge eating, the embarrassment, the fact that it feels silly to have so many problems. When, oh when, will I be normal?
‘Normal?’ I can almost hear Holly spitting out her coffee on the other end of the phone. ‘You of all people should know there’s no such thing as normal.’
‘No such thing as normal!’ I beam. ‘I like that.’
Abridged extract from Mad Woman: How To Survive a World That Thinks You’re the Problem, by Bryony Gordon, which is published on 15 February (Headline, £20); pre-order at books.telegraph.co.uk
Telegraph subscribers are invited to join Bryony on February 21 to discuss her new book online. For more information and to book tickets, visit telegraph.co.uk/events
