From both sides of the chair.

The afternoon is half gone before I notice I haven’t eaten. Not because I was being disciplined, or “good”, because I was three tasks deep in something and my body never sent the memo. Then, later, once everything finally goes quiet, hunger arrives all at once, loud and urgent, like it’s making up for being ignored all day.

For a long time I thought that was a character problem. A bit of mess. Something more organised people had sorted out. It took me years, and a lot of training, to understand it was never about willpower. It was about how my brain is wired.

I sit on both sides of this

I’m an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and an ANZAED Credentialed Eating Disorder Clinician. I’m also ADHD. So when someone sits across from me and describes forgetting to eat, or eating becoming the nearest place to put a big feeling, or the after-the-meds hunger that lands at night, I’m not only recognising it from a textbook. I know that terrain from the inside.

That changes the room. Not because lived experience replaces clinical training. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, but because it sits alongside it. You can feel the difference between someone who has studied a thing and someone who has also lived it. There’s less translating to do. Less proving you’re “bad enough” to be taken seriously. You get to skip the part where you explain that your brain doesn’t run on a steady, predictable signal, because I already know.

Food stuff really is brain stuff

So much of what gets framed as a discipline problem is actually a brain doing exactly what it’s wired to do. Interoception, the sense of what’s happening inside your body, can run quiet or arrive late. Executive function gets stretched, and the regular rhythm of eating falls through the cracks. A sensitive nervous system can turn a small comment at the table into a whole day. None of that is a moral failing. It’s neurology, meeting a world that mostly wasn’t built for it.

Naming it that way matters, because shame has never once helped anyone eat. The most useful thing I can offer isn’t a stricter rulebook. It’s a different lens. Curiosity instead of scoring. Support that fits a real, neurodivergent day, not an idealised one.

Why I built this room

Body Belonging is, honestly, the room I went looking for and couldn’t quite find, somewhere serious about the clinical work and genuinely warm about the human one. Somewhere your neurodivergence, your culture, your identity and your story aren’t side notes to be managed around, but the starting point. Somewhere you don’t arrive already braced to defend yourself.

The chair in our name isn’t decoration. It’s the actual thing I wanted: a seat kept for you, no bar to clear first, no part of yourself to leave at the door.

If this is you

You don’t have to be sure what’s “wrong”, or certain it’s “an eating disorder”, to reach out. If food, focus and the body have become tangled and heavy to carry, that’s reason enough. Making sense of it together, with someone who gets it from the inside, and has the training to hold it well, is the work.

This article is general information and a personal reflection, not therapy or a diagnosis. If you’re struggling, please reach out to your GP or a mental health professional.