Make Peace With Food

Former Actress and model Mel Wells had an unhealthy relationship with food for many years, until she one day realised what a negative impact this had on her life. Here she tells us her journey of learning to love her self, her body and her life.

When did you start to become aware that you had an unhealthy relationship with food?

I knew that it wasn’t normal when I was 17, but it felt like a secret and as if it gave me some kind of control, so I didn’t see it as an issue then. I think that when you start off controlling your food you feel you are the one in control, but eventually it ends up being the thing that is controlling you.

I kept it a secret as part of the control thing, but also because I knew that if my mum found out she would be really upset. So I knew that it wasn’t right, but at the same time I wanted to keep doing it.

How did it later escalate so that you finally realised it was an issue?

I think it was when I was in the soap opera, as I then lived by myself. I found myself getting up in the middle of the night to go and buy loads of junk food to binge on, which would cause me to lock myself away, because I felt so ashamed of what I had eaten and it started to really feel like an addiction.

Then the bingeing turned into bulimia, which I was in denial over. In the end my mum found out so she took me to see a hypnotherapist and spent a lot of money on this. Because I felt that it should have worked I pretended for a long time that it had, but in reality I was still doing it. But then I had to keep it even more of a secret, so I kidded myself that I was in control of it and that I was fixing it. Another year would pass and I still hadn’t fixed it – it was still there.