How Veganism Helped my Disordered Eating
“But veganism is an eating disorder!” snorted the fossil-fuel tycoon.
“How can something that makes me feel so good be bad for me?” asked the heavy-hearted vegan.
“I dunno,” continued the tycoon, now red in the face. “I’ve never done anything that made me feel good, as such.”
The vegan arched their eyebrow.
“Unless there’s money to be made, of course!”
Content warning: eating disorders
First of all, I should mention that this is by no means a recommendation that anyone suffering from some form of unhealthy eating habit should look to veganism as the panacea. What works for one doesn’t necessarily have the same effect on others.
All the same, I’d like to talk about my journey with food and how I ended up where I am today: a land of unbridled positivity, otherwise known as North London.
Levity aside, most of us who have struggled with our eating or diet in the past know that it can be a protracted battle. It doesn’t just go away one day; we learn to suppress the urges and forge our personalised path to a healthy relationship with food. It can take a long time or a little time, but it’s almost always an intense journey.
As a young child, I was always very slim. I loved to play outside and was about as active as your average child ought to be. Then suddenly one day, I started to gain weight.
For some reason, it wasn’t a gradual increase that my parents might have been able to curtail, instead, I just seemed to go from slim to overweight in the space of a couple of months.
That story describes much of the rest of my youth. From the ages of about 7–18, I was constantly gaining weight. I had a terrible relationship with food even in adolescence, cycling between eating immense quantities of food to then starving myself to mitigate the damage.
For over 5 years I did not eat breakfast or lunch. I drank a ludicrous amount of full-fat fizzy drinks, regularly ate takeaway meals and snacked all night on crisps, chocolates and whatever else I could get my hands on.
Honestly, I didn’t even think this was abnormal. I knew that I was overweight, but I had no idea how the future implications would manifest. The incessant derision in the changing rooms at school, the physical bullying, the name-calling, not fitting into normal clothes, the anxiety of sitting on a squeaky chair, the alienation from my peers — there were endless reasons for me to want to lose weight.
All of these experiences form the ugly foundation of a negative body image. The psychological effects have lingered (I’m 26 now) and even though I know I’m physically fit and mentally in a much better place, I still regard my reflection with anxiety sometimes.
Although my parents were aware that my weight bothered me, and in their own ways, they both wished they could help me to slim down, only I had that power.
Before I started university in 2013, I decided to embark on an epic weight loss quest. I knew that a huge part of what had marred the high school experience for me resulted from my weight. It prevented me from ever fitting in and I was determined to not have the same experience at university.
The first thing that I started was yoga. As someone with anxiety over my body, the idea of working out in a gym always nauseated me, so finding an exercise I could do in my bedroom was a great first stepping stone.
And so, for the whole summer, I did about 20 minutes of yoga every single day: they were the most basic poses imaginable (now, after practising for almost a decade, I’m shocked I lost any weight doing them at all). On top of that, I cut out all fizzy drinks, snacks and takeaways. Over the course of a few months, I lost about 20kg.
Continuing down that same trajectory for the next 18 months or so, my weight eventually plateaued around the 90kg area, where it seemed I could go no further. I knew why, even though I didn’t want to admit to myself the real reason. The drive that I had a year earlier had slowed down and I’d become kind of comfortable with where I was.
But something terrible started happening when I realised I had lost that willpower. When I saw that the weight was actually beginning to go up again, I took my first steps in one of the most life-altering and destructive directions to date: I developed bulimic tendencies.
It wasn’t an everyday occurrence at first. Maybe 2–3 times a week after one meal was all. There was something addictive to me about it too. It seemed so easy, and I almost wondered, why hadn’t I been doing this all along? I started eating more again, only to dispose of the excess down the toilet. Not once did I think that this was harmful.
And that’s the thing when your mental health starts to deteriorate — when something is truly wrong, we’re often oblivious. People who think they’re really ill often aren’t, but the ones who have no idea? They could be grappling with something dreadful and not even realise it.
The addiction to my new eating habits was debilitating. Before long, I’d also developed binge-eating tendencies. Everything was impacted in my life because of this. Looking back, I think the fatigue was the worst. There was a general heaviness or weariness that I woke up with every day that I could never place, as if someone had stuck a straw in me and was draining every ounce of vitality I had.
Talking about these issues can be triggering, so I won’t go into any further detail about this particular vicissitude, so let’s shift direction towards the positive parts!
While I had been fighting the various unhealthy eating habits, I think something I always knew would help me would be a slight measure of control over what I actually could and couldn’t eat. This first took form by my weekly meal plans which I used to write up on a Word Doc. The act of writing what I was going to eat beforehand somehow helped.
At the same time, living with a vegetarian undoubtedly had a big impact on the way things progressed from there. She (who’s still one of my best friends) opened my eyes to new ways to eat and approach food. My family don’t generally eat pork or shellfish, but I’d never had a meat-free friend before.
There were challenges with changing to a vegetarian diet at first, but along the way, I realised that I began to feel differently inside both physically and mentally. It was no longer about control, I was just doing it because I enjoyed it. I felt healthier inside, and as a result, the psychological shambles that was my relationship with food started to ebb.
This will always be a memorable moment for me, but the healing process took much longer. Other setbacks came, including the loss of my dad and a difficult year away from home on exchange in China. I regressed to an omnivore diet, and not the two are interdependent, but I quickly lapsed back into my old bad habits, more severely than ever.
I wondered if I would ever be free from the woes of unhealthy eating patterns. Food was always the thing I turned to in times of sadness, and in those moments, the emptiness you had before ends up being more desirable than the ephemeral joy you get from filling a void. Dennis Potter once said that religion was more the wound than the bandage, for me, the same was once true of food.
In time, I recovered from losing my dad and when I returned to the UK for my last year of university, I made a commitment to be vegetarian again. For the most part, it worked. I had a healthy year, waltzing around on pills of sertraline and plenty of kale.
But I knew that it wasn’t sustainable, and I wanted to reach the point where I didn’t need to take medication or have constant meetings with mental health professionals.
When I graduated, I returned to China to study. I tried to be vegetarian but ultimately did a shoddy job. I ate liberally, and as the months went by, I realised that this whole time I’d known what the cure was for me. I’d been dipping in and out of it for the past several years. Every time I started to eat meat again, my eating habits plummeted and I became intensely anxious over my weight and body image. Being plant-based had always been the thing that rescued me from the abyss.
2 years went by in China before I came back to the UK for good. When I started my Master’s degree, I told myself that I’m going vegan and I’m never going back this time. It was the last thing I needed to do to maintain my healthy relationship with food.
And so, nearly 2 years later, I am still vegan and have never been happier. A weight seemed to lift when I wholeheartedly decided to stick to it. Staying in one country also helped — I knew that the years travelling between countries and cities impacted my mental health a lot too.
But now, I love food more than ever. I enjoy everything that I eat and take immense pleasure in food. I have always loved to cook, but making plant-based meals has become a passion that both releases creative energy and relaxes me.
When I changed my diet, I also made a bigger commitment to my physical health. Not only do I still practise yoga regularly, but I also run (always outside, never on a treadmill) and go swimming. These were activities that I never would have dreamed of doing in the past. I didn’t have the confidence.
Along this long journey of recovery, I have realised so much more about plant-based eating. While I was initially drawn to it from a dark place, I now see it for the huge ray of positivity that it is in the world. There are so many benefits of being vegan, and that’s another part of why this diet has helped me on my journey to mental harmony.
Knowing that, however small, my willingness to go plant-based is something that benefits the whole planet, whether from the standpoint of animal cruelty or environmental sustainability, brings me joy. I’m not generally the evangelising type, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge the benefits of going plant-based. I know it may not work for everyone, but it has helped to bring me to a good place both mentally and physically.
A lot of us battle with our eating and I especially feel for those who are influenced by mainstream media, which encourages such outrageously unachievable standards of beauty, but our bodies are all our own.
No one should be driven to depression over their size. But there are ways to recover, and though the path may look different for each individual, everyone is capable of loving themselves and living a healthy life.
