My first encounter with disordered eating came following the death of my sister. I was thirteen, and with the benefit of hindsight I can now look back and speculate that it came as a mental response to feeling helpless; I wasn’t able to control life, (or death), in order to prevent her passing, so my mind settled on something it could control as a sort of consolation prize. I don’t even particularly remember disliking my body -- not at that point -- but I do remember seeing pictures of (possibly just naturally) very slim girls on Tumblr, and thinking ‘I could look like that’. From there, it took hold, and became an obsession.

I quickly found a way to track my calories, a website, which I lied about my age in order to join. It had a huge database of every food brand imaginable for you to find and calculate your intake, and could also tell you how many calories you had lost through various exercises. It advised eating 1200 calories a day, (the Dietary Guidelines for Americans advise that teenage girls need to be consuming between 1600-2400 calories daily, depending on the activeness of their lifestyle), and for a while this was enough for me. I felt like I was testing myself. It was at this point, really, that the secretiveness of eating disorders kicked in for me; as my family was low income, I received ‘tokens’ to buy my lunch with. I got worried that the school would inform my dad if I stopped using the tokens, so I would dutifully go and buy a sandwich and a biscuit, (British biscuits, that is, not American biscuits), and give them to a friend. I’d have a small breakfast each morning, walk forty minutes to and from school each day, have whatever my dad made for dinner, and then some sort of exercise in my room for the last few hours of the day. Eventually, that stopped being enough for me. My breakfast became just a black coffee. I’d deliberately take longer routes to and from school, and I’d play around with dinner once I got home, asking my dad for smaller portion sizes. I tried to get my calorie count down to eight hundred each day, and for the first time, found that I was struggling with this. My reaction -- I suppose, another way of reclaiming control of the situation -- was to self-harm.

From here, I sort of spiraled, becoming more conspicuous in my behavior. I remember my sister watching me in disbelief one day after a meal at my grandma’s, as I proceeded to run up and down stairs for an hour. Her and my dad both threatened to contact my teachers after I refused to order anything from a Chinese takeaway on a family holiday.

My friends began to notice the scars dotted across my body, and one urged me to tell my head of year. I did, and was put into mandatory counselling. Maybe this could have helped, but the counselor was newly qualified, and didn’t understand that I would sometimes need to be prompted into speech. For a few sessions, we just sat in silence for an hour. I eventually told him that he’d been very helpful, and that’s it, I was cured. The sessions discontinued, and I remained how I was -- restricting food intake, exercising obsessively, and cutting myself.

What eventually drew me out of the behavior wasn’t actually any sense of emotional recovery from what had at this point become a hatred for my body when it was anything but ninety pounds, but simply inability. I moved in with my mum, in a different city, and no longer had my own room. I couldn’t exercise for hours, because my sister would know, and for the first couple months of moving there, I had no school, and this meant my stay-at-home mum would know if I didn’t eat throughout the day. I still managed to persist in small ways --I’d request low calorie meals for dinner, and exercise in short bursts whenever she left the house -- but for the most part that control had been taken away from me. I hated it, but I can see now it was a good thing. I gradually was able to work myself back up to a healthy weight.

But eating disorders don’t stop when they appear to have been fixed physically. You’ll probably know that though their most obvious manifestation is physical, the psychological impact runs much deeper. For a while, I binged. It was like once the control I had over my eating loosened just a little bit, I lost it entirely. I’d be able to eat 'normally' right through until the end of the school day, but I’d eat snack after snack after snack once I got home. It took a good while for me to understand the need to listen to what my body wanted, and not just concentrate on how it looked.

Even now, I still struggle with this sometimes.

I’ll judge what I’m going to eat based on how guilty I’ll feel afterwards, and sometimes feel compelled to skip meals if I think I’ve been overeating in the recent days. Or, sometimes I’ll realize that, by chance, I haven’t been eating as much recently, and my brain will press me to see if I can continue this trend, see how long I can go on such a small diet. I’ve found that letting the people around me know about this is a great help, it means that they can keep an eye out for self-destructive behaviors, and keep me in check if they appear. On top of this, I’ve found the body positivity movement to be a great source of comfort when the old ED thoughts manifest. Not only does it make me feel better to see people of all shapes and sizes reveling in their beauty, but it makes me feel better to make other people feel better. Or, things like this (!) – writing about my experience, and feeling an outlet for all the emotions caught up in my brain surrounding it all, often helps. I’ve provided a few links below on various charities and information pages for eating disorders.

I’m better than I was before, and in the future, I’ll be better still.

• This link is designed to help you support loved ones with eating disorders
• This is the National Eating Disorder charity.
• Project Heal Raises money for individuals who otherwise couldn’t afford eating disorder treatment, as well as raising awareness of eating disorders generally.
• The Body Positive ‘recognizes the intersectionality of physical, psychological, and emotional needs in human beings’, and ‘empower[s] people with practical tools, inspiration, and support to find their own way to lasting good health and greater happiness’.