29 Aug 2025

Beyond the Binary: My Journey with Binge Eating Disorder as a Queer, Neurodivergent, Disabled Man

In this blog, Lived Experience Advocate and Researcher Aaron Saint-James shares his lived experience navigating an eating disorder.

When people think of eating disorders, they rarely picture someone like me, a tall, fairly slender person who carries himself well. I’m a queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and physically disabled mature-aged university student. People look at my body and assume I’m fine, that I couldn’t possibly have an eating disorder. The invisibility of my struggle is part of what makes it so isolating. I don’t fit the stereotype of who “gets” eating disorders, yet I’ve been living with binge eating disorder for years, a reality shaped by the complex intersection of my identities and experiences.

My relationship with food isn’t simple. It never has been. Growing up in a lower socioeconomic household meant food scarcity was a constant undercurrent. There were times when meals were uncertain, when cupboards stayed empty longer than they should have. That early experience of not knowing when food would come next created a deep, primal anxiety that still lives in my body today. When food is available now, part of me still panics, what if it’s not there tomorrow?

The Neurochemical Reality Behind the Cycle

What many people don’t understand about binge eating in neurodivergent individuals with C-PTSD is that it’s not just psychological, it’s neurochemical. When I eat sugary, high-carbohydrate foods, my brain gets a hit of dopamine and serotonin that it desperately craves. As someone who’s neurodivergent, my brain doesn’t produce these neurotransmitters in typical amounts. The sugar provides temporary relief from the constant state of dysregulation, anxiety, and sensory overwhelm.

For those of us with C-PTSD, food becomes even more complex. The act of eating triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and digest” response that tells my traumatised nervous system it’s safe, at least temporarily. Sugar and comfort foods don’t just taste good; they literally sedate and calm the hypervigilant state that trauma survivors live in. It’s self-medication, not self-indulgence.

But here’s the cruel irony: while sugar provides immediate neurochemical relief, it makes the system less functional in the long term. The crashes are brutal. What goes up must come down, and when my blood sugar drops, so does my mood, my focus, and my ability to regulate emotions. I’m left more dysregulated than when I started, which drives me to eat again to get back to baseline. It’s an addiction cycle disguised as comfort eating.

My ADHD medication adds another layer of complexity. Some days it suppresses my appetite entirely, making it easier to fast in the mornings, which I tell myself is “healthy” but is really just another form of restriction. Other days, when the medication wears off, the rebound hunger is intense, and I find myself bingeing to compensate for the calories I didn’t consume earlier.

The Perfect Storm of Stress and Survival

I’m not just juggling assignments, I’m managing chronic health conditions, financial stress, and the trauma of past food insecurity, all while trying to succeed academically. Unlike younger students who might have family support or fewer life complications, my stressors are layered and interconnected.

When university pressure mounts, especially around deadlines or when I fall behind due to health flare-ups, my anxiety spikes. Food becomes my primary coping mechanism because it’s one of the few things I can control. I eat to regulate my nervous system, to quiet the overwhelming sensory input that comes with being neurodivergent, and to self-soothe when everything feels too much.

But here’s where it gets complicated: I have dietary intolerances and IBS. The comfort foods I crave often trigger painful flare-ups that then activate my other chronic conditions. It’s a vicious cycle, stress leads to eating, eating triggers IBS, IBS worsens my chronic pain and inflammation, which makes it harder to function academically, which creates more stress. Then I eat again to cope with that stress. It’s a closed loop of shame and physical discomfort.

The guilt trips are relentless. When I spend my limited money on takeaway or sugary, processed foods, food that I know I wouldn’t choose if I were fully functional and healthy, the shame compounds. I have high standards for myself, and I’m usually very disciplined. But when I’m dysregulated, those standards become weapons I use against myself. I know better, I tell myself. I should be stronger than this.

The Weight of Multiple Marginalisations

Being a gay man adds another layer of complexity that eating disorder resources rarely acknowledge. The gay community has its own intense pressures around bodies, lean, muscular, hairless, and young. Being neurodivergent and disabled in that space makes me feel like I’m failing at “masculinity” from every angle.

The shame spiral is intense. I internalised the message that I had to be “hot” or “beautiful” to be seen, loved, or even safe. That pressure, combined with trauma and my need for control, made food both a weapon against myself and a shield from the world.

Before my back injury in 2021, I could rely on exercise as both a coping mechanism and a way to punish myself for eating. I told myself it was “healthy,” but looking back, it was just another form of disordered behaviour, using movement to earn food or compensate for eating. When I lost that outlet due to disability, I had to confront the reality that I still deserved to eat, even without “earning” it through physical pain.

The Healthcare Maze

Navigating healthcare with multiple intersecting conditions is exhausting. Every service wants to treat one part of me, but I don’t come in parts. One clinic focuses on IBS without understanding how anxiety drives my eating. Another wants to address my eating patterns without considering my neurodivergent executive functioning challenges or trauma history.

I’ve been told to “just plan meals better”, advice that’s laughable when executive dysfunction makes planning anything a monumental task. I’ve walked out of appointments more ashamed and overwhelmed than when I went in. Rarely has a provider looked at the full picture of how my neurodivergence, disability, queerness, trauma, and eating patterns all intersect and influence each other.

The eating disorder field still largely operates from a framework designed for thin, cisgender, straight, white women. Resources that acknowledge the experiences of queer, disabled, neurodivergent men are virtually non-existent. I’ve never had a provider ask how my queerness or neurotype affects my eating behaviours. It feels like I have to do the work of educating them while also trying to heal, and that’s both exhausting and dangerous.

Breaking Down Myths

Let me be clear about what binge eating disorder actually looks like for someone like me: It’s not laziness or lack of willpower. It’s a neurochemical response to trauma, disability, and chronic stress. When I eat to manage anxiety, I’m trying to regulate a nervous system that’s been in survival mode for years. The sugar isn’t just comfort, it’s medication for a brain that can’t produce enough of the neurotransmitters it needs to function.

It’s especially invisible when you’re tall and naturally slender. People see my body and assume I’m healthy, that I have my relationship with food figured out. They don’t see the internal struggle, the shame spirals, the way food controls so much of my mental and emotional landscape. The assumption that eating disorders only affect visibly underweight people means that those of us who binge, especially those whose bodies don’t show obvious signs, are overlooked entirely.

It’s not about wanting to be thin or beautiful, though body dysmorphia certainly plays a role. It’s about trying to find some semblance of control and comfort in a world that consistently tells me my body, mind, and identity are wrong. Food becomes both medicine and poison, temporarily soothing but ultimately adding to the shame and physical discomfort.

The myth that men don’t struggle with body image or eating disorders is particularly harmful. We do, we just express it differently and have fewer safe spaces to discuss it. The myth that neurodivergent people are “just picky” or “just anxious” dismisses the very real sensory and emotional challenges we face around food. And the assumption that exercise is always healthy ignores how movement can become another form of self-punishment.

Finding Fragments of Hope

Recovery isn’t linear, and it doesn’t look the same for everyone. For me, it started with small moments of recognition, like realising that even though I couldn’t exercise anymore after my injury, I still deserved to eat. That was huge, uncoupling food from punishment or the need to “earn” it through pain.

Meeting other queer, neurodivergent people who shared similar struggles helped me replace some of the shame with self-compassion. There’s power in knowing you’re not alone, that your experience makes sense given your context, and that your pain is valid.

I’m still learning to work with my nervous system instead of against it. I’m discovering that sometimes the most radical act is eating something nourishing when my brain is screaming that I don’t deserve it. I’m slowly building a relationship with food that acknowledges my limitations, my dietary intolerances, my executive functioning challenges, and my financial constraints, without adding layers of shame.

What Needs to Change

We need eating disorder resources that acknowledge the full spectrum of human experience. We need healthcare providers who understand that marginalised bodies carry different traumas and require different approaches. We need to recognise that binge eating disorder is a legitimate mental health condition that affects people across all identities, body sizes, and backgrounds.

Most importantly, we need to stop pathologising survival strategies. When someone is struggling with food, they’re often trying to survive something invisible, trauma, neurodivergence, discrimination, poverty, or chronic illness. The eating patterns make sense in context.

A Message of Solidarity

To anyone reading this who identifies with my story: your pain is valid. Your eating patterns make sense given what you’ve been through. You are not weak for struggling; you are surviving. There is no one “right” way to heal, and there’s no timeline you need to follow.

Your experience matters. Your body deserves care and kindness, exactly as it is, today. You are not alone in this complicated, messy, beautiful journey of learning to nourish yourself in a world that wasn’t designed for bodies like ours.

The conversation around eating disorders needs to expand to include all of us. Our stories matter. Our healing matters. And our voices can help ensure that others don’t have to navigate this journey in isolation, the way so many of us have.

Recovery is possible, even when it looks different from what you expected, even when it’s non-linear, even when you’re starting from a place of multiple marginalisations. You deserve support, understanding, and hope. You deserve to take up space in the conversation about healing. You deserve to love yourself unconditionally.

Get Support

No matter how the eating disorder developed, recovery is possible, and Butterfly is here to help.

For confidential and free counselling, call the Butterfly National Helpline on 1800 ED HOPE (1800 33 4673) or chat online or email, 7 days a week, 8am-midnight (AEDT).

Find an eating disorder professional – search Butterfly’s National Referral Database to find eating disorder practitioners closest to you.