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Richard Osman says his ‘shameful and bizarre’ battle with food addiction began when his father walked out on the family after confessing to an extra-marital affair.
The presenter and author was just nine-years old when dad David Osman announced he was having affair before leaving his wife and children in Sussex and relocating to Warwickshire with his new partner.
And Osman believes his issues with food served as a coping mechanism as he struggled through childhood without an adequate father figure.
‘It’s traumatic, that’s for sure,’ the presenter, 55, explained during the latest instalment of John Robins’ How Do You Cope? podcast.
‘It’s difficult to put yourself back in your nine-year old brain. What do you know when you’re nine? Nothing, but you know family, and you know that there’s a certainty when you go home, and that’s ripped from you, so that would be a trauma for certain.
‘I would say that I didn’t deal with that trauma. This happened in the 1970s, which was a very different time, and it wasn’t the done thing to talk about it. So long as I looked OK, that was OK for everyone else.’
He added: ‘I was able to subsume it, put it to the back of my brain and not deal with it in any way; the more modern thinking is that’s not very healthy. But I’ve always had a very quick brain so I was able to find routes through this pain I was feeling and through this betrayal that I felt, and show a face to the world that was comfortable, and happy, and secure, and bits of me were, but it catches up with you.
‘I would say in my late twenties and early thirties, I’d run out of road with this new person I’d created, this person who was able to hide from pain and run from pain, and tell a different narrative.
‘That was gone, so I had to deal with it then because I didn’t deal with it when I was nine, because how could I deal with it when I was nine?’
Osman says food addiction enabled him to realise something was wrong, but it would be years before he confronted the issue head on by enlisting the help of a therapist.
‘I’d had that when I was very, very young,’ he recalled. ‘People will do the maths and work out that from nine years old there’s very little that you can control, but one of the things, maybe, is food.
‘So, I’d had that for as long as I could remember. It was a huge problem for me, it was secret, it was very, very shameful, and all the other shames about who I am were channeled through that. I understood that something was up, and food was the thing that showed me something was up.
‘I’m from a background and a generation where I wouldn’t have gone to therapy unless I had a presenting issue. I think if I’d just felt discontented with the world, I wouldn’t have gone to therapy.
‘I’d have told myself to buck up or something like that, but because I had this very bizarre relationship with food that became so weird I had to see someone about that particular issue.
‘You go to see a therapist about food addiction and of course it’s the last thing he’s interested in, because he knows it’s a symptom of something else, he’s looking into why it is your coping mechanism.’
He added: ‘I’m always happy to talk about food addiction because people are embarrassed about it… I embarrass myself when I talk about it or when I think about my behaviour with food, but there will be people listening to this now who feel the same… it’s been a dominant theme in my life.
‘If you can talk to that shame, that’s the only way you can deal with food addiction over a lifetime.’
