Torture of being addicted to food

Lifestyle – Frances had issues around food since she was eight years old but it took three decades before she accepted that she was a compulsive eater who was powerless over her craving for sugar. That was two years ago. Until then, a crisis like Covid-19 would have triggered her addiction, as she tells JUDY MURPHY. It’s a difficult time for people with eating disorders, but she says they aren’t alone and help is available.

“There wouldn’t have been enough money or time in the world to hoard the food I’d have needed for a lockdown, before I joined Overeaters Anonymous,” says Frances about the issues with food that dogged her since she was eight years old.

Frances (not her real name) spent almost 30 years doing all kinds of weight-loss programmes, hating herself for binge eating and lack of willpower until she finally realised she was addicted to chocolate, sweets and biscuits, a realisation which changed her life.

A successful woman in many regards, it wasn’t simply that she was weak-willed around food; she was an addict, she says. But until she acknowledged that, she had the delusion that she could control her eating.

Now, Frances wants to share her story. She knows that, in the current shutdown when so many of us are at home all day, under pressure and worrying about the future, there are people who are suffering like she did.

“There’s so much food and so much stress,” says this teacher, aged about 40 who is eloquent, humorous and occasionally tearful as she recounts her decades of food addiction.

If the Covid-19 pandemic had happened two years ago, the uncertainty it’s created would have traumatised her hugely.

“I’d have been saying ‘I need to have a stash of food’,” she explains. “Before joining Overeaters Anonymous, I wouldn’t have been sleeping and my mind would have been going at 100 miles an hour.”

There isn’t a woman – or probably a man – in Ireland or any country where food is plentiful, who hasn’t sometimes felt like a glutton after pigging out on something pleasurable.

But addiction is different, according to Frances. “It’s the thought pattern that leads you there [to overeating] is what makes it an issue.”

For compulsive over-eaters, too, it’s about having the need to stop their destructive behaviour and not being able to.

Frances believes her issues around food began aged eight.

She’d had a row with a friend and was feeling sad at the injustice of the world. Then she went to a coffee shop with her mother and had apple tart. The dessert filled her with happiness and fixed everything.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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