From about age 11, I believed happiness came in a smaller size. I tied my worth to my appearance and spent years chasing that impossible ideal: fad diets, fat burners, skinny teas, meal replacement shakes. If it promised a fix, I bought in.

By my early twenties the cycle had tightened into something I couldn’t name. I’d start a plan with the best intentions, fall off by Thursday, find myself secretly eating in my car, then drown in the shame that followed and promise to do better tomorrow. When my GP finally named it, Binge Eating Disorder, I was floored. Like most women living with this, it had always felt like a personal failing, not a condition.

I wasn’t offered therapy. I was offered weight loss surgery.

So at 23, I drained my savings for a gastric sleeve. I got the body I thought I wanted. And I kept bingeing. Even in a smaller body, sitting alone in my car, I was still eating to the point of sickness, the shame was identical. Losing the weight was never going to fix my relationship with food, because no surgery changes your nervous system, or rewires years of diet culture conditioning.

That was my turning point. Healing couldn’t come from shrinking my body. It had to come from repairing my relationship with food, with myself, and with my body image.

So I became my own healer. I studied psychology, completed a Master of Counselling with a focus on eating disorders and body image, and built what is now my Food Freedom Method, the framework at the heart of everything I do. I’ve been binge-free since 2019.

MY MISSION

Binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder, more prevalent than anorexia and bulimia combined. Yet fewer than half of those living with it ever get support. We’re the most dismissed, the most likely to be told to just try harder.

I built Binge Free Bestie because world-class support shouldn’t be a privilege. Through The Break Up, my podcast, and soon my book, my mission is to reach every woman still eating alone in her car and show her there’s another way, one that has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with finally understanding what’s really going on.

I’ve now supported over 400 women through this journey. I host a top-ranked Mental Health Podcast in Australasia. I won Steven Bartlett’s ( Diary of a CEO) business challenge out of 16,000 competitors. And I’m just getting started.

The vision: a world where no woman has to spend her life at war with food or her body. Let’s do this bestie.