OHMYGOSSIP — Joe Lycett has had to overcome a food phobia which made him scared to eat.
The ‘Great British Sewing Bee’ host has been living with a type of “eating disorder” which makes him scared to eat or drink and he has had to train his mind to overcome it so he can ingest food normally.
Speaking on The Matt Morgan Podcast, he said: “It was beer at first, then it sort of developed into everything. I thought if I had beer then I would feel sick, so I stopped having beer and I was on to wine. Then it became anything. Even a glass of water at its worst would make me feel sick and everything would close up and tense up.
“Basically it’s an anxiety thing. I now know how to kind of let it ride out, I suppose. I don’t have the fear that I had with it. I sit with it and I’m fine.
“At one time it was really bizarre. It’s quite a common thing. I’ve spoken to quite a few people who have got similar but slightly different things around food and I think it’s probably a form of eating disorder, that feeling.”
The 33-year-old comedian says his entire body would have a physical reaction to food and he would feel instantly nauseous and wouldn’t be able to swallow any morsels.
He explained: “Basically, what would happen would be I would struggle to swallow something because I thought I was going to sick it back up, so my body wasn’t allowing me to swallow stuff. It’s a sort of response to what I was perceiving as a threat, I suppose, so one of the first things to alert you to a threat is the digestive system. Vomiting is quite a common thing with eating disorders and anxiety. But I never once vomited, I haven’t vomited for years. So I knew rationally that I wasn’t going to vomit but my whole body was convincing me that if I had another sip of that drink or if I ate another bite of whatever then I would be sick. So I had to learn to override that and think, ‘OK, maybe I’ll be sick. So what?’ “
Joe is not completely over his food phobia and “it still rears its head” but the scale of the problem has diminished massively.
He said: “It still rears its head and even talking about it now brings, I’d say, three per cent of it back … It slightly spoils a meal once in a while and that’s it.”

Source: VacationHunter.Online