Nicole Gaviria battled an eating disorder before turning her life around – and turning her struggles into a business. Now she's the winner of a global competition, collecting a $170,000 prize to launch "Binge Free Bestie". Photo / George Heard
Warning: This article includes content that may be distressing for some readers.
At the height of her eating disorder, Nicole Gaviria sat in her car surrounded by empty burger boxes. Embarrassed and angry with herself, happy had long left the meal.
The final crumbs of the dopamine hit that began before the first bite were washed away by a tidal wave of guilt that carried her home to hide the evidence of another binge she’d sworn would never happen.
“Tomorrow I’ll eat clean,” she’d tell herself as she pulled into her driveway before furiously stuffing the rubbish deep into the outside bin or attempting to burn it in the fireplace before she was discovered.
The guilt and self-loathing were much harder to dispose of. She could not hide the pain in her eyes. The shame sat conspicuously around her waist.
“For me, when I was eating, I would almost be looking down at myself, a bird’s eye view. It was robotic. It’s like I wasn’t there, I was totally checked out,” says Gaviria.
Her drive-through order was as many burgers as she could afford.
“I would buy the maximum amount of food that I could with the cash I had. Bearing in mind, I was flat broke, so I would spend money that I didn’t have on this food addiction.
“So, if I had $20, how many burgers can I get for that? I can get four cheeseburgers, or I can get a Hunger Buster, and so on. I didn’t care about the quality of the food; I just wanted maximum food that I could get.”
The true cost of her binge eating would be much, much greater – taking her to the dark depths where suicidal thoughts lurk. Trapped inside a body that she says she hated.
“I couldn’t look in the mirror. Going shopping was the worst thing you could ask me to do.
“Nothing in any of the malls would fit, you know? My weight just went up and up and up, and I felt completely invisible in society as well. Like, people don’t look you in the eye if you’re ‘a big girl’, as I was referred to often by other people,” says Gaviria.
Growing larger made Gaviria feel smaller.
“People don’t ask you on dates, you don’t get offered the promotion. And so, I did notice that the bigger I got, the more I felt that sense of rejection.”
Gaviria wasn’t always a “big girl”. Her battle with her weight came late in her teens.
She grew up in Christchurch’s east – in a suburb that barely exists any more, quake-wrecked homes and neighbourhoods replaced by the uninhabited red zone.
“I didn’t have any problems with my weight or food or eating when I was growing up, but my mum did. My mum was always on the latest diet or Weight Watchers book, or we were watching The Biggest Loser, you know, all of that was subtly in the background.”
Her food choices were limited – until she went to university.
“The first thing I went for was the foods that Mum said no to. It was a pretty slippery slope of as soon as I had access to money and no one was watching me, I started to go for all the naughty foods,” says Gaviria.
The food noise was growing louder by the day.
“I’d freak out and be like, no, I must be good. So I’d go on a diet, and that’s when the cycle started.”
There was another motivator to Gaviria’s newfound love/hate relationship with food, a common issue among binge eaters.
“It was also a way to dissociate from life. I had a traumatic event during university. Looking back now, I understand it more like I really should have got support for that from mental health teams. I didn’t. The way that I coped with it was using food to soothe, using food to dissociate,” says Gaviria.
Her gain in weight was putting pressure on her body that she could ill afford.
“My family were pressuring me a lot to lose weight because of a heart disorder. We all have it. It’s just a genetic thing,
“So through my whole 20s, it was fluctuating between being on the latest diet or juice cleanse, fat burning pill, bikini body guide, and then the next minute I would be eating five or six burgers in my car, hiding.
“It just goes around and around – a vicious cycle, but I didn’t see it as a biological response or any sort of coping tool. I just saw it as ‘I’m a loser, I can’t do this. There’s something wrong with me. It’s my fault’,” says Gaviria.
Frustrated and exhausted by the continuous loop, she sought advice from her GP.
“She diagnosed me with binge-eating disorder, and she said, ‘Well, have you ever thought about bariatric surgery’? I didn’t even know what that was.”
Bariatric surgery is designed to enable weight loss. It includes procedures such as a gastric sleeve, which physically reduces the size of your stomach, making you feel full faster and eat less food.
“I went home and researched it, and I thought, perfect solution. Take my stomach away, then I can’t f*** it up any more. The problem is me and my lack of control, so take the control away.”
At her heaviest, Gaviria was 110kg. That much weight on her frame with a heart condition meant she was – in her GP’s eyes – at mortal risk. A life-threatening medical condition allows the patient to withdraw their KiwiSaver to pay for treatment – and that’s just what she did.
“I’d been working at Countdown since I was like 14, saving into that KiwiSaver to buy my first house. Withdrew the whole lot. My family and my [former] partner were very unsupportive. A lot of shaming from them around, you know, ‘Why can’t you just do it? You’re wasting your money. You’re putting yourself in a terrible position for the future’.”
She says those close to her looked at her bariatric surgery as a lazy way out of obesity.
“At the time I decided to get the surgery, I was alone. I flew up to Auckland for that on my own.”
If Gaviria thought the surgery was the silver bullet, she was about to learn otherwise. Surgeons removed 80% of her stomach in the procedure, and with it her hunger.
“They take out the whole pouch. They take out the part of your stomach that produces your hunger hormones and things like that. It felt like an absolute blessing at the time, because it was like I magically woke up with no desire to eat. When I did eat, I felt full after one to two teaspoons for the first couple of weeks.”
Also gone was the food noise. The exhausting inner monologue that policed Gaviria’s diet.
“So, straight after surgery was a hard time. My relationship ended. I moved in with my friend, to her garage. I love her. The weight came off very, very rapidly, and all of a sudden, like magic, I started getting asked on dates, I got offered a new job. People would open doors for me.”
Even shopping was fun, with Gaviria able to fit clothing from “off the shelf”.
“I felt like I could just be in the world with everyone else.”
And still the weight came off – even in her sleep.
“Some days I’d wake up and I’d lost a kg overnight. I’d look at myself in the mirror and just cry. It was overwhelming.”
But as time went on, it became clear that the support network for binge eaters like Gaviria, post-surgery, was virtually non-existent.
“After about six months, the food noise came back, the hunger hormones switched back on, and I ended up eating again. I also ended up developing like a transference addiction to alcohol because I couldn’t put food in my tummy, but I could put cocktails in my tummy,” says Gaviria.
“Now it’s under control, but, you know, I had to admit that to myself.”
She was referred to an eating awareness group, but was soon turned away.
“I went to the group, I told the lady privately, like, ‘Oh, just so you know, I’ve just had a gastric sleeve, but I still want to be here and learn the tools’. And she said, ‘No, this is not for you. This is not for anyone who’s had bariatric surgery.’ So she kicked me out after the first session.”
This was the catalyst for Gaviria’s next quest – merging her lived experience with her tertiary qualifications.
“I went back to do my Master’s in counselling at UC [University of Canterbury] with the intention of wanting to support women like me. And I knew that I needed to get my registration because I wanted to be taken seriously.”
Gaviria says when she went through her weight-loss transformation, suddenly people told her how proud they were of her.
“But when I went back to uni to do my Master’s, they didn’t talk to me. [They were] disappointed in me. I’m ‘irresponsible’. I’m ‘flaky’. I ‘don’t know what I want to do in life’. I said, ‘I’ve never been more sure of what I want to do in life. I need to go get this piece of paper so that I can build my private practice and do what I want to do.’”
“Binge Free Bestie” is the brainchild of Gaviria and her battle with the binge. It aims to counsel women through binge and emotional eating.
“I don’t tell people what to eat. I tell people how to eat and how to work on that relationship with food.”
It is a programme for women like her. It is the programme she’d needed so often – but couldn’t find. And it’s just won a global competition by Diary of a CEO podcaster and Dragon’s Den investor, Steven Bartlett. The British-Nigerian entrepreneur has millions of followers across his social media platforms and his podcast has surpassed one billion streams.
The competition by Stan Store was aimed at building business through social media.
Gaviria beat out 16,000 other contestants to claim the prize of US$100,000 ($170,380) and a trip to Los Angeles for a mentoring session with Bartlett.
“I want to get on that podcast. You know, I’m going to be a guest on Diary of a CEO. That’s the next goal,” says Gaviria.
The Christchurch entrepreneur has a habit of manifesting incredible outcomes – don’t bet against it.
Mike Thorpe is a senior journalist for the Herald, based in Christchurch. He has been a broadcast journalist across television and radio for 20 years and joined the Herald in August 2024.