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There were two of me – there was Ana (the anorexia) and then there was the real me. I felt like I was being controlled by Ana, and the more food I ate the more my own personality came back.
After looking back on the years of my life that were taken due to my eating disorder, I realise how much I now love my life and want to keep recovering every day.
Will you skydive for Beat this Eating Disorders Awareness Week? Take part along with hundreds of other brave fundraisers, and skydive together to help end the pain and suffering caused by eating disorders.
Bulimia isn’t a disease or bug you just get over by taking antibiotics. It is a mental illness that takes over.
I won’t go into the reason why I developed bulimia because I want to focus on recovery. I was diagnosed at age 35, and I had developed it as a teen. Roughly 18 – 20 years of malnutrition and semi-starvation.
The first time my mum dragged me against my will to the GP to see why I was losing so much weight, to “knock some sense into me”, I was told that I “probably had an eating disorder”, but unfortunately I was “not thin enough to receive help”…
I think I was about 14 years old when my eating disorder started, but I think I’ve always had disordered traits as a young child.
Everything is a learning curve, especially in recovery, when it can feel like you are literally learning to live again.
When you’ve had an eating disorder for so long, you become numb to the feeling of not eating. The fear that food will harm you is entrenched into your mind, so you just don’t allow yourself to enjoy food.
When I was at the lowest point of my life, about ten years ago, I said to myself ‘It can’t get any worse.’ It was that bad. However, I realised that this was a positive statement. If it can’t get any worse, that means it can only get better.
Completing my A levels was hard. I soon became obsessed with revision and control, not feeling like I had ever done enough or was enough.
Going to my GP in March of last year was something that I knew I had to do. Don’t get me wrong, I was so scared and nervous about how I would tell someone I didn’t know that I was struggling with eating and coping with social occasions which involved food.