Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas

And there's a lot of signs as well on the vulnerability of young neurodivergent people who experience more situations like that because we might actually come into a situation with curiosity and looking for a bit of dopamine without knowing what we are doing and then finding ourselves in a tricky situation, you know, where somebody takes advantage of you.

So it's a combination of things that when we think about food, we think about what food is good for you, what food is bad for you.

And you lose the whole context that food is very emotional, is very messy.

And we are messy individuals living in a messy world.

So just to try and make it all super clean and tidy, it doesn't quite work.

Particularly when you have a brain with quirks itself and a nervous system with quirks that has got extra need for safety that perhaps maybe a neurotypical brain is not so demanding in that respect.

So I lived with a disordered way of eating for a long, long time.

But at the same time, I was dishing out advice based on neurotypical norms for a long time during the height of my career in nutrition when I was doing a lot of clinical work, one-to-one and in teams.

I was even doing that when I was working as part of a psychiatry team dealing with addiction situations that was very specific.

But we were very neurotypical in that respect as well.

because it was before my diagnosis and I didn't have the awareness.

And something was kind of like resonating with me thinking, shouldn't we be treating these people who are very, very vulnerable in a particular way that is more comforting as opposed to, okay, because they had money, try and give them the ideal diet because they had a chef or something, because I was working with people who could afford that kind of lifestyle.

And, uh,

And then the penny dropped when I got my diagnosis.

You know, like you wrote in your first book, you know, like now I understand.

Well, for me, I understood so many things.

I understood so many things that were complicated and that they took time to unravel because the diagnosis was like the gateway for me to start thinking, maybe I've been doing this, maybe I've been going back for seconds so many times because of this.

And it wasn't because I was...

morally faulty it wasn't because i was um broken it wasn't because i was uh um yeah there was something wrong with me it was because i was looking for the safety and the comfort that food was giving me and if we don't understand that food is used as a safety blanket by neurodivergent people a lot of the time then i think we're missing out a lot of the picture so that's where my empathy comes from it comes from me but

Then I don't want to be completely anecdotal and say, because it's happened to me, it's going to happen to lots of people.