Celebrity baker Una Leonard has revealed that she battled eating disorders while building her career in the cooking world.
Una has published a bestselling book called Sweet Therapy in which she describes how to make her favourite cakes and how baking helped her through the hardest of times:
“I had anorexia, I had bulimia and I was socially unable to eat in front of people,” she explained to The Pat Kenny Show.
“So that kind of led into my eating disorder but I absolutely love food.
“I love creating food, I loved being in the kitchen, I love cooking for people.
“But I just couldn’t love it myself.”
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Her problems with mental health began in secondary school and became increasingly serious as time went on:
“I just started to hate myself, I didn’t like myself and I was taking control of the one thing that I could control which was what I was putting into my body,” she recalled.
“So I stopped eating because I wanted to fade away as such. I didn’t want to be noticed, I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to be doing all of those things.
“But I was still going to my camogie games and showing up to everything with a smile on my face and acted like everything was okay.”
Ironically, while she often struggled to feed herself properly, it was making food for other people that brought her respite from the dark thoughts swirling in her head:
“It was like you’re completely out of your mind, you’re in the kitchen, you’re in a flow, you’re putting these ingredients together and creating something,” she continued.
“And it was so special. Hours would pass and I would just be happy out in there.”
Over the years, this fascination with baking became a serious business and she launched her own company, 2210 Patisserie, which now has 15 staff members:
“At the beginning, it was a passion project. It was purely a business to get me to do something every single day that I loved.
“And it’s still something that I love to do every single day and I don’t mind if I have to get up every day at two o’clock in the morning, if I have to work a 30 hour day, whatever I have to do.
“But it wasn’t easy.
“I remember the days at the beginning, I couldn’t get any credit from any of my suppliers, I was selling buns and closing the door and running down to buy supplies to be able to make a cake with the money I’d just got in.
“But it didn’t matter because I was doing the thing that I loved to do.”
Main image: Una and Pat Kenny.
