BRYONY GORDON: The unhealthy eating that trapped me hasn’t gone anywhere. I’ve found only one way out of this trap

I remember clearly the first time I decided to throw up a meal. I was 18 and trying to work out how to tread the fragile line between my body’s need for food, and society’s need for me to look thin, and try as I might, I could not stop eating.

I could just about pull off the starvation trick during the day, endless cans of Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights somehow destroying the evil that was my appetite.

But when I got home in the evening I felt like a woman unleashed, a pig tearing through the meal my mum had cooked, not to mention the crisps she tried to hide from me at the back of the cupboard.

I felt such shame about this behaviour – why couldn’t I survive on a bowl of cereal all day like the woman in the red swimming costume in the TV adverts? – that I found myself cooking up a way to try to balance it out.

To atone for my over-eating, I would make myself sick. As I crept upstairs and ran the bath to drown out the sound of myself retching, I remember feeling like I’d discovered some genius life hack – I could eat, without putting on weight!

But the feeling of euphoria was short-lived. The binges became bigger, the purges more intense, and I wondered if I was destined to spend my life trudging between the fridge and the bathroom, my skin becoming more and more sallow, and my teeth rotting in all the stomach acid I routinely expelled through my mouth.

I was taken back to this awful period while watching the Take That documentary that has just been released on Netflix. A reminder of my rampant bulimia was not quite the nostalgia I had expected when settling down to watch the film about my favourite teenage boyband.

It seems, however, that disordered eating and screwed-up body image was so endemic in the Nineties, that it had even reached Gary Barlow, the group’s lead singer and chief songwriter.

‘There was a period of about 13 months when I didn’t leave the house once,’ says Barlow now, of that time after the band broke up in 1996. ‘I also started to put weight on. And the more weight I put on, the less people would recognise me. I thought: ‘This is good, this is what I’ve been waiting for, living a normal life.’ So I went on a mission. If the food passed me, I’d just eat it … and I killed the pop star.

‘One day I thought … I’ve eaten too much, I need to get rid of this food. You just go off to a dark corner of the house and just throw up, just make yourself sick. You think it’s only once and all of a sudden you’re walking down that corridor again and again … it only took a few years to get that low, but it took me years to get back to who I wanted to be. Ten years probably.’

I’m grateful to Barlow for speaking about this eating disorder, because we seem to have stopped talking about the conditions that controlled so many of us during the Nineties and Noughties. Perhaps it’s the vomit, perhaps it’s the fact that anyone can now ‘deal’ with the complicated relationship they might have with their body by simply jabbing themselves with Mounjaro.

But here is Barlow reminding us of a very inconvenient truth: that most people over the age of 35 grew up in a diet culture that left us thinking it’s perfectly normal to punish ourselves for eating – or by eating.

Like Barlow, who took back control by keeping a food diary, it took me years to break the binge/purge cycle that dominated so much of my life. I only broke free from the tyranny of bulimia when I got pregnant in my early 30s, my unborn daughter giving me a respect for my body that I had hitherto lacked.

The bingeing would remain in place, though, for almost another decade. Indeed, it was only in my early 40s, when I realised I was ‘coping’ with lockdown by stuffing myself with vast quantities of cooking chorizo and crisps in the dead of night, that I finally sought help from an eating disorders therapist.

And so it was that, at the age of 42, I learnt how to feed myself properly for the first time in my life. This therapist taught me about the link between restricting food and bingeing it.

She pointed to something called The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a clinical study from 1944 which remains the gold standard by which eating disorders specialists understand the psychology of hunger.

The study showed that you don’t have to be underweight to enter a state of starvation – it can happen to anyone in a significant calorie deficit, in a body of any size.

Furthermore, it found that when people restricted food, they became more preoccupied with it, with many participants experiencing a ‘loss of control’ when they were allowed to eat again.

In short, the brain urges you to eat when it realises the body is starving. This is not a moral failure, but a crucial evolutionary step for survival. And that the ‘food noise’ people complain of is, in some cases, just plain hunger.

This cycle of restricting and bingeing food is now being played out on a massive scale, as people try to wean themselves off weight-loss injections. Users report being ravenously hungry as soon as they stop taking the drugs and feel despair as they pile the weight back on.

The unhealthy eating patterns that trapped me and Gary Barlow in the Nineties haven’t actually gone anywhere, contrary to popular belief. Diet culture has simply disguised itself in injection form, trapping everyone in an expensive cycle of prescription medicine instead.

There’s only one way out of this trap, I’ve found: it’s to eat more, not less. We need to stop starving ourselves, start consuming three proper meals a day, and accept that not everyone is meant to be a size 8.

Everybody is different, but there is one thing we all have in common: it’s only by fuelling ourselves properly that we stand a chance of living the healthy, happy lives we all deserve.

For help on eating disorders go to beateatingdisorders.org.uk

Trust BA to make us livid

Those of us trying to log into our British Airways accounts on our phones have been met with endless error messages over the past month – and yesterday, in common with thousands of other users, I discovered BA had wiped every single one of the 38,000 ‘Avios’ reward points I have loyally accrued over the years (that’s almost £500 worth of flights).

The world’s favourite airline? I think not, but it is definitely in the running for World’s Worst App. 

You forgot the ‘granny pants’ siren, Sydney!

Actress Sydney Sweeney has launched a new range of lingerie backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and if that doesn’t put you off then just wait until you find out its name. It’s called Syrn, pronounced ‘siren’ because the designs have been created around four different types of ‘siren’.

There’s the ‘seductress’ (think OnlyFans), the ‘romantic’ (think rose petals), the ‘playful’ (think underwear as outwear) and the ‘comfy’ (think Calvin Klein model). But Sydney is missing one last siren: the ‘granny’, featuring a slightly greying high-waisted pair of oversized knickers. Now those I’d buy. 

Madonna wins over Margate

Is there anything more delightful than seeing a celebrity completely out of context? Take Madonna, spotted last weekend in Margate, of all places. Apparently, the locals were ‘stunned’ to see her there, but ‘no one bothered her’.

I had a similar experience walking my mum’s dog in the wilds of Cornwall a few weeks ago. There was Zorro, happily sniffing the bum of another canine, when I looked up to discover its owner was actress Cate Blanchett. Like the locals in Margate, Zorro and I didn’t bother her… but I’m afraid the same cannot be said for her poor dog.

In the week it was revealed that women lose grey matter in their brain during menopause – perhaps explaining why we’re more at risk of dementia than men – there is finally some good news about ageing.

According to a survey, we don’t hit our creative peak until we are 67, with two thirds of Brits over 60 saying they feel more creative now than they did in their 30s, and a whopping 94 per cent believing that they are more creative than other generations. Proof, if other menopausal midlifers like me needed it, that the best is yet to come.