Hello. My name is Lynne and I’m a secret eater.

It started as a way of having something that was just for me. I’d just had our second baby and I was suffering from post-natal depression, although I didn’t realise that straight away. After all, it made no sense. I had the perfect pregnancy, the perfect home birth, the easiest child in the world (at least for the first 8 weeks). What was there to be depressed about? But it seems I needed a way of feeling better, so I turned to sugar. And not in a small way.

Everyone knows that sugar picks you up when you’re down. The trouble is, it also dumps you like a bad date when it’s been used up. So while your blood sugar levels increase quickly with simple sugars like glucose, they drop just as fast, and that makes you need to eat again to balance things up. Historically, whenever I went through a bad bout of depression, I would see my chocolate consumption rise, and as much as you might have tried to convince me otherwise, Haribo Star Mix was definitely one of my five a day.

But post-natal depression is very different from “regular” clinical depression. For a start, while the symptoms can be similar, post-natal depression is rarely misdiagnosed as clinical depression. Instead it is dismissed as mum being a bit over-tired or worrying too much. Mis-diagnosis would be better than this. And even though you might have a history of depression and would therefore be able to recognise it when it rears its ugly head, post-natal depression is sneaky. You’ll dismiss it because it’s not the same so it can’t be. You’ll tell yourself you’re just tired, that it’s natural to worry about your baby. But this is elevating those things to the status of art form, and so it was that after 6 months of trying to convince myself otherwise, I finally owned up to myself that something was wrong. However, since this coincided with me finding out that I needed kidney surgery, it all kind of went on the back burner and I coped in different ways. Thus Lynne the secret eater was born.

It started off with small things. Like buying a chocolate bar when I picked up my coffee at work, or buying a small pack of sweets and eating them in the car on the way home from the shops. But those small things escalate, and in my case, it escalated to the point where I would buy a family size trifle (serves 4? yeah right!), sit in the car in the supermarket car park and eat the lot, put the evidence in the bin, drive home, put the shopping away, cook dinner and eat the same size portion as my six foot two husband who had an active, job that kept him on his feet all day.

This went on for a long time. Every time I went out, I would buy something to eat in the car before I went home. Everything I ate, I ate in the car where no-one else could see and disposed of the evidence so no-one else would know. It got to the point where at five foot one, I weighed twelve and a half stone (that’s around 170lbs or 77.5kg). It’s not a great look, and it’s an even less good feeling. But when my youngest was 18 months old, I had to have major surgery. So I decided to join Slimming World to lose some weight so that I wouldn’t need so much anaesthetic. And it worked. I lost 2 stone (28lbs) in 4 months, which I was really pleased with.

The trouble is, that Slimming World didn’t really teach me healthy habits, only how to follow their plan. And so within six months, I had not only gained back even more weight than I’d lost for the surgery, I was also back to the secret eating. And so, there I was, stuck in a rut of addiction that I couldn’t get out of. And it wasn’t until we moved out of London that I had the opportunity to do anything about it. So it was that about a year after we moved, I joined Weight Watchers; partly to lose the weight and partly to meet people in the area we’d moved to. I didn’t want to go to Slimming World as that was where my mum went and the last thing I needed was to go with her, love her dearly though I do. It took me 18 months, but I lost 4 stone (56lbs or 25kg) and got down to a healthy BMI. In fact, I loved Weight Watchers so much that I trained and became a leader (as they were called at the time; they’re WW coaches now). I ran two meetings a week and absolutely loved it.

But again, it was all about following their plan, not learning about nutrition, and a huge mental health hit, brought about by a lot of stresses that I won’t go into now but which resulted in a nervous breakdown, saw me gradually start to gain the weight back. The breakdown forced me to stop classes and pretty much everything else that wasn’t putting one foot in front of the other, and the resultant weight gain of an extra stone and a half above what I had been before joining Weight Watchers was something I had absolutely no control over.

So let’s fast forward four years. I’ve lost half the weight I’d gained, which has taken its time but health issues and injuries get in the way (as does my own head from time to time, just like any other human being). I still snaffle the occasional bag of Drumstick Squashies, and that’s the big £1 bags, not the small ones with about 8 pieces in them. But I do it far less now than I did, having learnt about nutrition and having found a way to handle the cravings. Just like any other addict, I take it one day at a time. And I can’t remember the last time I ate trifle.