My Story...

For years, I thought food was the problem

I began binge eating as far back as I can remember.

My childhood was very difficult, and food became comfort very early on. I was bullied about my weight, deeply embarrassed by my body, and by the time I became an adult I already believed that losing weight would somehow make everything better.

So I did what so many women do.

I dieted.

Again and again.

For more than 30 years, I tried to fix myself through food, weight loss and control. I tried every diet going, often more than once. I thought if I could just be more disciplined, more successful, more in control, then I would finally feel better.

But no diet ever touched the root of what was really going on.

On the outside, my life looked fine

When I was 40, my sister and I opened our own gym.

I was nervous about being the front person because I was a UK size 18, which isn't what people expect from a PT, but I wanted plus-size women to feel included and know that plus size does not have to mean unhealthy or unfit.

My life became very full. I was working hard, deeply involved in the local community, known, trusted and respected. For the first time in my life, I felt important and valued.

The bingeing eased for a while, not because I was healed, but because life felt full and I felt seen in a good way.

I just didn't understand that at the time.

Then everything fell apart

In 2018, my sister was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

The following year was devastating. When I wasn't working, I was at her bedside. She passed away in December 2019, and not long after that, the world shut down with Covid.

That was when everything I had been distracting myself from caught up with me.

The grief - not just for my sister, but for my mum and dad too, family feuds, toxic relationships, the hurt of all of it - became too much, and I had a breakdown.

Shortly after, I sold the gym and moved to the coast.

And that was the moment I knew something in me had to change.

The question that changed everything

For years I had been asking:

How do I make myself stop eating?

But after everything fell apart, I started asking a completely different question:

Why do I need food so much in the first place?

That question change my whole perception of binge eating.

I switched off from distraction, came off social media, turned my phone off for a month and went inward.

I started writing down the thoughts that were in my head.

All of them.

And that was the turning point.

Because that was when I woke up to the understanding of what food had been saving me from.

Myself.

The voice in my own head was mean, unkind, unforgiving and a bully.

Not to anybody else.

To me.

I realised I had been living with shame, guilt, disappointment and a constant sense of not being enough, without even fully seeing it.

Recovery began when I stopped blaming food

Once I understood what food had been doing for me, the struggle no longer looked like a lack of control.

Food had been providing comfort, relief and safety when I did not know how to give those things to myself.

That gave me somewhere entirely different to begin.

I spent the next year going deeply into healing. I immersed myself in reading, workshops, retreats, meditation and inner work. That process eventually led me to create my own recovery programme.

In early 2023, I trialled that programme publicly on TikTok over 120 days.

Day 1 was: quit dieting for good.

That was terrifying.

Dieting had felt like my safety blanket for over 30 years. But I knew that if I was really going to overcome binge eating, I had to stop trying to solve it with the very thing that had kept me trapped.

So I stopped restricting.
I stopped calorie counting.
I stopped trying to control food in the old way.

And slowly, I found more peace with food, my body and myself.

But even then, there was still one more piece I had not fully understood.

The missing piece was self-worth

Later, during another very stressful chapter of life, I could feel the old heaviness creeping back in.

I wasn't binge eating, but I could feel the familiar internal struggle returning.

So I went inward again.

And that was when I saw the deepest belief underneath it all:

I did not believe I was enough.

That was the missing piece.

I came to understand that all the inner work in the world can only go so deep if self-worth is missing at the root.

Because without self-worth, self-love and self-care can feel forced.

But with self-worth, they become natural.

That realisation changed my life.

It shaped the deeper message behind all my work and eventually led to The Self-Worth Diet and WORTHY - the book and workbook I wrote for the woman I once was, the woman who did not need another diet, but desperately needed to understand herself.

If any part of my story feels familiar, I hope it helps you see that food may not be the real problem, and that the deeper beliefs underneath it are often where the real healing begins.

Beyond this work

My life is simple. I live on the Essex coast with my two French Bulldogs, Harry and Dobby, and I am also a grandmother, something that fills me with joy.

And like you, I'm still learning, still growing and still paying attention to what truly matters.

Glenys xx