#they kept trying to steal people's food at the snack bar it was obviously extremely annoying for the staff but very entertaining as a guest

[cadere-art]

A pair of trash raiders.

A raccoon,

and a coati.

[minihappybaker-blog]

My Story of recovering from Anxiety and Binge Eating Disorder: Part 2- Greedy

It's been a few weeks since my first post. The reason for that is that it is harder than I imagined to write about something so personal. I want to start this chapter by saying that I don't want my story to come across as a 'poor me' story at all. I am extremely lucky that I have a wonderful family, awesome friends new and old and a very supportive husband who pushed me to get help when I needed it most. I just want to tell my story as honestly as possible because I'm proud of how far I've come and because just maybe someone might come across this who is going through some of the same stuff and it may help. Xx

For as long as I can remember I have used food to comfort me. It's easy to see that now that I have an understanding of my illness (chronic anxiety disorder) but at the time I had no idea my eating patterns were in any way linked to anything else. As far as I was aware, I was just greedy. I liked food too much and that was something to be ashamed of and hidden.

I had always been a very nervous and anxious child. My mum tells me that when I was very small (maybe 5 or 6) I was terrified of being left on my own at night and to get me to go to sleep I made her recite a list of various foods, bread, milk, cheese etc. The list had to be in the same order every night otherwise there was no chance of me going to sleep. I'm sure lots of kids have similar bedtime rituals however illogical they may be and I'm not suggesting that there was anything especially unusual about mine. I just think it's interesting, knowing what I know now, that even as far back as that it was a list of foods that soothed me to sleep.

  I wont say that I had a difficult childhood because that would be unfair to people who aren't fortunate enough to have the things many of us take for granted. I had loving parents and I never went without food or clothes, but I do think it's fair to say that for whatever reason, I found childhood difficult. My dad was well known in our small town as he was the local vicar. In a small, working class town in northern England, we were painfully middle class and not just that, but we were religious. I was different to my classmates and I felt it acutely.

While my friends mums read magazines and listened to pop music, my parents read books and listened to classical music and church hymns. Conversation in our house often revolved around church politics, sermons or Sunday school. While my friends parents took them on foreign holidays or to holiday parks at the beach, my parents took us to cottages in the countryside or occasionally to Christian retreats. Our holidays were spent going to look at stately homes, museums or churches. My friends went to theme parks and amusement arcades.

I went to church on Sundays while my friends went on shopping trips or were allowed to lounge around until midday in their pyjamas. My friends lived in 2 or 3 bedroom semi detached houses that were pleasantly decorated and cosily furnished. We lived in a large detached 5 bedroom house provided by the church that we didn't own which always felt draughty and slightly shabby.

We also spoke differently. I quickly learned that it was not 'cool' to use the long words I heard at home or not to have the same broad northern accent that my friends had. I  didn't understand the swear words they sometimes used and quickly tried to learn them to get up to speed. I was desperate to fit in, to be 'normal'. Being different was the worst thing in the world in my eyes.

Although I can remember feeling like this in primary school, the need to be 'normal' was amplified massively  when I started secondary school.  My parents were keen for me and my siblings to go to the best school available to us and this meant that they scoured the local league tables and I was sent to a school in a different catchment area to my primary school. This was unusual in my town where the vast majority of kids simply went to the nearest school. This meant that starting secondary school was especially nerve wracking for me as I knew very few people.  I soon realised I had the wrong shoes, coat, schoolbag etc. Girls were suddenly talking about kissing boys, something I had no idea was supposed to be on my radar already. I can remember feeling desperately self conscious and as though every day was an effort to imitate the other girls to mould myself into one of them or to not say or do anything that would mark myself out as 'different' or 'uncool'.

I was a chameleon. I played the part of being the same as everyone else. I dumbed myself down so I wouldn't appear posh or 'swotty'. My accent became far more pronounced than my brother and sisters as I subconsciously mimicked the people around me. I desperately studied the latest  pop music (something that my parents had no interest in) and tried hard to learn the words to songs that everyone else knew. Even a conversation about a film that everyone else had seen was stressful to me as I pretended I had seen it too for fear that I would be outed as weird or different if I admitted to not having seen it.  I pretended to be working class just like my friends. When I heard things that shocked me I pretended not to be shocked. I told no-one about going to church on Sundays or being in the church choir.

I'm sure lots of people have a similar experience at school. For me, putting on a mask didn't end when I left school. Throughout university and my work life, I played a part. I was what I thought people around me wanted me to be. This wasn't a conscious decision for me, I wasn't trying to deceive anyone, it was simply to only way I knew to how to make friends. It made it easier for everyone if I was 'normal'.

 Pretending to be someone you're not even for a few hours is exhausting. Imagine doing that for 15 years. I might sound  dramatic but I can honestly say that when I met my husband 7 years ago when I was 24, I felt this overwhelming sense of relief. Here was someone who had seen through my façade straight away and wanted to get to know the real me. For the first time I could remember I felt like I could relax and be myself with him. I felt like I'd been holding my breath for years and hadn't even realised and I could suddenly let it out.

When you're living this way you are constantly on edge. Looking back now my anxiety definitely stemmed from feeling different and desperately trying to fit in. You get used to living on a knife edge and that becomes your normal. Food, very early on became a way for me to escape the constant effort to be someone else and gave me some comfort. Meals and treats became the highlights of my day, the only time I could fully enjoy something without feeling like I was doing it wrong.

One of my first memories of properly binging was when I was about 12. My dad had just let me start walking home on my own rather than getting picked up. This was very important to me because none of my friends got picked up from school so I felt that me getting picked up was another sign of how different our family was. Even though I lived much further away from the school than my friends my dad reluctantly let me walk home. The walk took nearly an hour but I didn't care, I was thrilled to be one step closer to being just like my friends.

I can remember every day a feeling of a weight being lifted off my shoulders when I passed the point of my journey when there were no other schoolkids walking my route.  The pressures of keeping up with  everyone  else melting away until tomorrow. There was a post office at about this point and I remember going in and spending about £1.50 on sweets. My lunch money was  £2/ day so I quickly worked out that if I just had a portion of chips for lunch all day, I could keep the rest of my money for my walk home and buy as many sweets as I could with the change and eat them in secret on my way home. I can remember sitting in my classes dreaming and planning the sweets I would by on my way home and how I could get as much as possible for my money. I would eat them secretly from my pocket on the rest of my walk home and then leave the wrappers in my pocket so that my parents wouldn't see them in the bin. I remember then telling my dad I was starving when I got home so I needed a snack before tea. While I was making a sandwich I would quietly close the kitchen door, stand on a chair so I could reach the cupboard where we kept crisps and biscuits. In our house you were supposed to ask for a treat and not just help yourself as most of my friends were allowed to. I would quickly sneak a handful of whatever was there, chocolate mini rolls, Bakewell tarts, penguin bars or something similar, slip them into my pocket and eat them sneakily after my sandwich when no-one was looking.

I also remember at Easter and Christmas or any time when us kids were given chocolate, I would eat mine piece by piece in one go in secret until I felt sick. Because of my dad's job as the local vicar it meant that a lot of parishioners wanted to give the vicars kids chocolates and treats so this was a lot of chocolate. My brother and sister's supply would last for weeks and mine would be gone within a day or two so I would steal their goodies when they were asleep. I can remember thinking they obviously didn't want it very much if they hadn't eaten it. On more than one occasion my sister ended up in tears because someone had eaten her favourite Easter egg. I never admitted it was me even though everyone knew I was guilty.

These behaviours are probably not too unusual and I'm sure most people snuck treats from the kitchen at some point in their childhood. But for me I can now look back and see that as social anxiety tightened it's grip on my life, food became the only way I knew to deal with life. Food brought me comfort but it also started me on a lifelong cycle of comfort followed by guilt and shame which would impact every part of my life. It would cause me to fail my 2nd year of my degree course twice, end up in an abusive relationship for over 2 years and to fall into a deep pit of depression. It gripped me in a cycle of alternately starving myself and then binging and eventually compulsively exercising and trying to make myself sick to 'undo the damage" I had caused. It also lead me to drink heavily and take a lot of drugs in an effort to escape myself but food was always my drug of choice.

Of course as the child who wasn't even overweight, sneaking treats from the kitchen cupboard, I had no idea that my behaviour was setting myself up for an addiction to food that would take over my life until I reached my 30's. I had no idea that the cravings I felt were actually due to a chemical imbalance of serotonin in my brain. To me I was just greedy and even before I had any awareness of my body or the label 'fat' I knew it was something to be very ashamed of.

Thanks for reading. I'm so excited to be sharing my story now that I have come out the other side. I feel so fortunate to be living the life I am now and I'm a firm believer that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looking forward to sharing the next chapters and sharing my story of recovery.

xxx