‘It Led Me Down a Path of Disordered Eating and Loneliness’: Opening Up About My Struggle with Emetophobia

By Eliza Duckworth

When I was twelve, I had the worst stomach bug I’ve ever had. I don’t know if this was the trigger for what would plague my mind for the next decade, but it fits with the timeline. The ‘thing’ that I am alluding to here is emetophobia: an extreme fear of vomit. 

This can mean actually being sick, being around sick, the sound of someone vomiting – literally anything to do with vomit. It may sound irrational and silly to some, but this fear caused me such intense anxiety during my teen years that it led me down a path of disordered eating and loneliness. At the time, I had no idea what emetophobia was. It is only recently that I learnt what the term meant and that it was what I had suffered from all these years.

It was through Zoe Sugg (aka Zoella), one of my teen idols, that I first heard about emetophobia. Zoe has recently given birth. When she announced her pregnancy, I was thrilled for her and decided to jump back on her YouTube channel to see if she’d uploaded any videos. She had. In her first trimester vlog, she spoke extensively on her emetophobia and how she had coped during those early weeks of morning sickness. 

Thanks to the magical algorithms of the internet, I then began to see loads of videos from (primarily female) influencers talking about their struggles with the phobia. I shared one of these on my personal Instagram. To my shock, I received around twenty replies – all from women – saying that they had the condition. Many of the people that I spoke to in my DMs were telling me familiar things: always carrying around Rennie’s and Gaviscon, being afraid to go out to restaurants, having safe foods – all things that I had done when I was in the peak of my emetophobia. 

I consider myself recovered now (almost). I still hate feeling sick, and I definitely don’t like being surprised when a director throws a violent and unnecessary puking scene into a film. But I do love food now, and I rarely avoid eating to accommodate my anxieties. I have done this entirely by myself. 

Having never had a formal diagnosis of emetophobia (no doctor ever took my worries seriously, but that’s for another time), I just had to get on with it and fix it myself. I am proud that I no longer restrict food and that I can deal with my panic attacks, but that doesn’t mean that I condone this ‘DIY’ approach to solving mental health issues. Emetophobia is a mental health issue; it can easily spiral into an eating or anxiety disorder, and even if it doesn’t, it’s still not easy to live with. 

According to anxiety.org, emetophobia is far more common in women than men, with an estimated 1.7-3.1% of men suffering, compared with 6-7% of women. Although this is a very binary way of looking at the data, which in itself represents the lack of research about the phobia, it does confirm my suspicions. I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist, so it would be dangerous for me to draw any solid conclusions from these percentages, but I do think that it is interesting. The lack of information out there is definitely representative of the general lack of information about women’s health available. 

Emetophobia is not exclusively a women’s issue. As with any anxiety, it can impact anyone. With that said, I think it’s important to highlight one of the biggest obstacles that emetophobia sufferers with a uterus face: pregnancy. Going back to Zoe Sugg’s video, pregnancy is something that people with the phobia fear the most. Morning sickness can be genuinely debilitating for pregnant people, but for emetophobia sufferers it can put them off before they even fall pregnant, which is particularly heart-breaking if you have always wanted children. I’m not sold on having children anyway, so this is something that impacts me less, but it is something I have worried about before. 

The point of writing this is not to throw lots of statistics out there (it’s very hard to find them anyway) but to simply raise awareness of this condition. I often think that if I had known what emetophobia was ten years ago when this all started, that it would have been so much easier to conquer. It would have also made my parents’ and my families lives a bit easier, too, as I don’t think any of us really understood what was troubling me. 

I also want to say that emetophobia is serious. For years, I felt like an imposter. I didn’t want to say that I had an eating disorder (even though I did), I didn’t want to say that I had anxiety (even though I did), and I definitely never wanted to admit that I wasn’t mentally well (even though I wasn’t). I’m glad that more people with the condition are speaking up about it. With every voice that does, I hope that it makes one other person feel braver.