How I Recovered from 35 Years of Binge Eating

For most of my life, having no control around food didn't make sense to me. In so many areas of my life, I was strong, capable, reliable and in control. I could handle pressure, responsibility and expectations.

And yet with food... something didn't match.

I emotionally overate and binged for more than 35 years. Not occasionally, but in a way that felt confusing and completely at odds with the woman I knew myself to be. Because I wasn't someone who avoided hard things. I knew how to commit. I knew how to follow through.

So why did this feel so different?

This is the fuller version of my story. And if some of it feels familiar, I hope it helps you feel less alone.

Where it began

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

My childhood was very difficult, and for much of it I felt like I was living in a nightmare. Food became my comfort very early on. I would hide food under my bed, and the wrappers and empty boxes would often be found and removed, but it was never discussed. Food became the place where I could find some distraction from the discomfort of my life.

I was bullied at school and called fat and all the other names that tend to come with being a bigger child. I was deeply embarrassed about my weight, even back then.

When I had my daughter at 23, I had gained 5 stone during pregnancy and thought it was finally time to lose weight. I went on my very first proper diet, counting calories, and to be honest it was really successful. I lost quite a lot of weight in a fairly short amount of time and was probably the slimmest I had ever been.

But a couple of years later I left that relationship and started a new one with somebody who was very conscious of my body size. It was a very toxic relationship, and the more my body became the subject of arguments, the more I would binge. The bigger I became, the more the dieting started again, and I never really stopped dieting for the next 30 years.

Like a lot of women, I tried every diet going, more than once. This was through the 90s and noughties when skinny was everything. I avoided beach holidays because I did not have a bikini body. I found it hard to find clothes that felt like me. I only ever dressed to cover my weight, not to express who I was. But then, I did not really know who I was. I was so lost in obsessing about losing weight and then binge eating.

Although my body size showed my secret struggle, my personality didn't. I never told anyone, and no one questioned it. I got a lot of diet advice, and I would often tell people I was on a new diet, almost as if that might stop them judging my weight.

The years I looked like I had it together

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 come and feel included, to know that plus size does not have to mean unhealthy or unfit.

Working out so much did change my body shape. My wobbly fat became toned fat, and that gave me an illusion of confidence. I was having a lot of fun and my life was very full, at work and socially. I became very involved in the local community and became someone known, trusted and respected. For the first time in my life, I felt important and valued.

Although the binges didn't stop, they happened less frequently and, because my weight wasn't fluctuating too much at that point, I wasn't so consumed by guilt and shame. I still dreamed of being slimmer and I continued to be on a constant diet, but I accepted this would probably be a part of my life forever.

What I didn't know then was that a big part of why the bingeing eased was because my life felt so full. I was busy, visible, involved, and needed. I felt seen in a good way. But I was not healed. I just didn't understand that yet.

When everything fell apart

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

She asked me to keep her condition between us. The following year was awful. Her treatment was harsh, and I was in the gym being asked where she was, all while trying to keep that secret. It was so hard, especially because our members had become our friends over the previous 9 years.

I was helpless to heal my sister's condition, and when I wasn't working, I was at her bedside. We also lived together, so there was no real break from it.

The binges came back with a vengeance.

In December 2019, she came home to spend her last few days with my daughter and me, and she passed away peacefully.

Then Covid came, and in a strange way it gave me some respite. The gym closed along with the rest of the world, and I took to my bed, comforted by bags and bags and bags of chocolate buttons.

But this time, the binges couldn't distract me from myself anymore.

The grief - not just my sister's death, but my mum and dad's too, family feuds, toxic relationships, the hurt of all of it - just became too much, and I had a breakdown. But I had just got two new puppies and I had a daughter to think about, so I knew I had to find a way to keep going.

Shortly after, I sold the gym and moved to the coast. Everything in my life that had been familiar changed. But ultimately, I knew it was me, my inner world, that needed to change.

Grief changed the way I looked at my life. It made me realise I no longer wanted to spend another year fighting myself around food.

So I stopped asking:

How do I make myself stop eating?

And began asking:

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

That question changed everything.

The moment I realised food was not the real problem

It all started in January 2022. I had been following the work of Dr Joe Dispenza for years. I had read the books, watched the videos, and I was deeply interested in his work around neuroscience, epigenetics and quantum physics - yes, I am that fun.

His work had inspired me for a long time, especially while my sister was ill. But what I realised was that I had all this knowledge and had never fully done the work. And knowing something is not enough.

So I switched off from every distraction and properly went inward. I turned my mobile phone off for a month, came off social media, bought an analogue phone so my daughter and best friend could still contact me, and sat with myself.

I meditated, and I followed one exercise where I wrote down all the thoughts in my head.

All of them.

I didn't let them just pass by unnoticed. I wanted to become aware of what was actually going on inside me.

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 living inside my own head was mean, unkind, unforgiving and a bully.

Not to anybody else.

To me.

I was living completely unconsciously with this constant inner dissatisfaction. I felt shame, guilt, disappointment, hopelessness. I felt like a failure. I believed I was a bad person who just wasn't enough.

And if I had not written those thoughts down, I think I would have carried on living in that, still blaming every person, circumstance and experience for my binge eating, without ever seeing what was happening inside me every single day.

I'm not saying I was to blame for the way I had learned to speak to myself. That was definitely handed to me by other people and other experiences.

But by then, it had become my voice. My words. My beliefs.

And the only person who had any real power to change that was me.

Creating my own recovery programme

That one month off-grid became a whole year of self-discovery.

During that time, I went in deeply. My daughter and I went to Egypt and Argentina on spiritual retreats. I sat in the Great Pyramid at 3am with 99 other people using sound frequency, and we danced through so much emotion in front of the Sphinx. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

We went to a Dr Joe Dispenza retreat in London for a week of meditation, and I walked out feeling like a different person. I also attended a workshop with Dr Bruce Lipton and learnt so much about epigenetics.

All of it - the workshops, the retreats, the reading, the resting, the healing - started to stir something in me.

By September, the ideas and concepts I had been learning started to become a recovery programme.

By December 2022, it was complete.

A friend suggested I go on TikTok and share it with anyone else who might be interested in following along.

I was still very self-conscious and not completely sure of myself, but I remember thinking, if you change nothing, nothing changes.

So on New Year's Eve, I posted my first TikTok. I explained that I was almost 52, fed up of dieting and fed up of living that way, and that I had written my own programme and wanted to trial it.

90,000 people watched that first video and around 2,000 people were interested in joining in.

So in early January, I trialled the programme, filming the daily task every day for 120 days.

And day 1 was: quit dieting for good.

Gulp.

What was I doing?

Dieting had felt like my safety blanket for over 30 years. But I just knew that if I was really going to overcome binge eating, it had to be that way.

Everything I had learnt was telling me it was the only way.

Knowledge just isn't enough. You have to actually do it.

So I jumped.

I stopped restricting.
I stopped calorie counting.
I stopped trying to control food in the way I always had.

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

At that time, if I'm honest, my main goal was still weight loss. I thought that if I lost weight, that would mean I had recovered from binge eating. But during those 4 months, I started to see it differently. Because when you stop dieting, walk away from diet culture, and start addressing the inner critic and the diet mentality, things begin to become much clearer.

During those 4 months I went from a size 20/22 to a size 14/16. Part of leaving diet culture behind meant never weighing myself, so I don't know the exact scale weight I lost.

But the best thing I lost was guilt, shame and not feeling enough.

I felt free.
I felt alive again.
Honestly, I would say it was the best I had ever felt in my life.

And it wasn't just me.

Other people following along were getting incredible results too. For some it was weight loss. For others it wasn't even really about that. It was more that they were finding a sense of lightness and freedom within themselves that made the whole thing worthwhile.

What binge eating had really been doing for me

Even after the 120 days had finished, I carried on doing the work. And as I kept unpeeling 35 years of binge eating, I began to understand something much more deeply. I could see that binge eating had not been some random behaviour I needed to fight against.

It had actually been trying to help me.

As strange as that sounds, it had been a form of support. A coping mechanism. A protection. It had been helping me deal with things I had never really known how to hold.

By that point, I felt lighter, freer and kinder to myself. But 35 years of an inner critic tearing you down does not disappear overnight.

The voice was still there.

The difference was, now I could hear it.

Now I was aware of it.

And because I was aware of it, I could begin to stop it.

For the first time, I could see that this process was not just healing my relationship with food. It was healing years of grief, trauma, loss and heartbreak too.

The more I carried on, the more I understood the depth of binge eating. I could see more clearly that it was not about food, and it was not about willpower either. It was far more deeply rooted than that.

It was tied up with old pain, old patterns, old beliefs and the ways I had learned to survive. I was so inspired by what had happened for me that I edited the programme based on everything I now understood and condensed it into a 60-day workbook called Weightless Life. A few months later, with the workbook published, I went back onto TikTok and again filmed the daily practices, this time using the 60-day version.

By then, I knew this perspective had helped me and had helped other people too, and I really wanted to get that message across. As I revisited the practices myself, I was still learning. Still unravelling more hidden parts of me that had been sitting behind the binge eating all those years.

By then I was back coaching part-time, but this time focused solely on lifelong binge eaters. I honestly couldn't believe this was my life. It sounds cheesy to say, but I really did feel like I had found my purpose. Like maybe all those years had not been wasted after all.

The missing piece was self-worth

But there was still one more piece I had not fully understood yet.

And life was about to show me exactly what it was.

Not long after that, my daughter fell pregnant, which was such a special time for us. But it also became an incredibly stressful one. We were told the baby had a serious life-threatening condition. After she was born, we practically lived at the hospital for weeks. I moved in with my daughter for 3 months to help support her, her partner and the baby.

Then, just a few months later, my daughter's dad suddenly passed away. It was a really difficult time.

And although I did not binge eat, I could feel myself slipping backwards within myself.

I was not eating well. I was missing meals, grabbing junk food at the hospital, overwhelmed, exhausted, and back in that heavy feeling I had lived with for so much of my life.

And because of all the mindset changes I had made over the previous 18 months, I recognised quite quickly what was happening. This was old pain, beliefs and patterns creeping back in.

I knew I needed to reset my nervous system and get back to the daily practices.

So I went inward again.

And as I went deeper into myself, I noticed not just the words of my inner critic, but the deepest belief sitting underneath them all.

I did not believe I was enough.

When that penny finally dropped, it was like a neon sign. It was so obvious, and yet it had been so deeply hidden, because that belief felt so familiar to me that I didn't even realise it had been guiding me in all the wrong directions and, of course, to food.

That was the missing piece.

All the inner work I had been doing - the meditation, the visualisations, the positive affirmations - they were all helpful. They absolutely helped regulate my nervous system.

But they were never able to fully resolve what was at the very depth of it all.

My self-worth.

Because without self-worth, all the self-love and self-care in the world can only go so deep. It can start to feel forced. Like something you're trying to make yourself do, rather than something that naturally comes from how you feel about yourself.

But with an acceptance of self-worth, self-love becomes a natural act.

It is no longer something you have to remember to do.

It is simply how you are with yourself.

And that changed everything for me.

Because I could suddenly see that when self-worth is your deepest belief, you do not keep harming yourself in the same ways. You feel safer within yourself.  You trust yourself more.  You stop outsourcing love, approval and acceptance, because you are no longer living with the same void of not feeling enough.

That understanding inspired a whole new direction in my work.

It was from there that The Self-Worth Diet was truly born.

I went back to writing, and the workbook was now accompanied by a book all about why self-worth matters so much, and how it becomes the foundation that helps regulate the nervous system into more safety. That message felt so integral to everything I had been trying to say.

I worked on the book for a year and eventually combined it with the workbook.

And together, WORTHY was born.

Looking back now, I can see that for years I thought the problem was food.

Then I thought the problem was dieting.

Then I understood the inner critic.

But underneath all of it was this deeper belief that I simply wasn't enough.

And once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.

I hope that as I've shared my story here, it has helped you see that food may not be the real problem, and that the deeper beliefs underneath it are often where the real healing begins.

Where to go from here

If my story feels familiar, there are a few places you can begin.

You can start with my free guide, The Power-Food Paradox, which introduces one of the central ideas behind my work and explains why you can feel capable in every area of life, yet still feel powerless around food.

If you want a more guided process, WORTHY brings together the book and workbook that grew out of everything I've shared here.

And if you feel like exploring the original processes for yourself, both the 120-day journey and the later 60-day version are still on my TikTok page.

Glenys xx