I had the opportunity to sit down with sophomore Whitewater Student Nathan Knight in order to learn more about eating disorders and how he was able to overcome them.
Knight had a binge eating disorder since he was able to order his lunch in elementary school. He would bring more food to lunch than his peers around him and then proceed to eat what his friends could not finish.
Knight was not sure why he was eating so much at first. He said he would eat so fast his body couldn’t communicate that he was full. Once he was finally full, he would still see food that his peers did not finish around him and would not want it to go to waste. Overeating continued until middle school, when he was introduced to food challenges.
Every Friday, his friends would meet at the local McDonald’s to watch him take on a new food challenge. He would try to eat 40 nuggets or 3 Big Macs in under 15 minutes. His friends would cheer him on, not noticing the eating disorder that was forming right in front of their eyes. Everyone thought he was so cool; he earned the nickname Human Garbage Disposal. It was around this time that he was noticeably gaining weight.
The problem would increase as he went into high school. He would cope with stress from tests by binge eating. Food made him feel so comfortable, but then he would become depressed from how much he was eating and just continue to eat more.
By his junior year of high school, he was heavily obese. Doctors told him he was 100 pounds overweight and needed to change his eating habits immediately if he ever wanted to meet his grandchildren someday.
This visit to the doctor was a turning point in Knight’s life. He started meeting with a therapist regularly to have a healthy relationship with food. The hardest part of this journey was accepting that he had a problem, but he knew he had to do something about it.
Knight started consistently going to the gym and tracking his calories online. In under four years, he ultimately turned his life around and lost over 150 pounds. Today, Knight is a massive advocate for binge eating disorder awareness.
“The first and hardest step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem and have to do something about it, after that, its all uphill from there.”
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