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Every year when Ramadan comes around, I open up about my experience with an eating disorder. It can be such a tricky time for those of us struggling.
They're the words you tell someone who is buried deep under revision or coursework. They're also the words you say to someone who is in recovery from an eating disorder.
I’m 22 years old. So far, I’ve sat through: 25 GCSE exams, eight AS Levels, six A2s, four preliminaries, four ‘Finals’, two drawn-out pieces of coursework, and one 12,000 word thesis.
You’re 15 and struggling with anorexia. I’m your 40-something-year-old self. You’re in a dark place, but it can get better. It will get better.
At the age of 18, during the summer I finished my A-levels before university, I developed anorexia nervosa. It happens quite unconsciously: the obsessive exercise, the compulsive calorie counting.
There are so many reasons why it is important to speak out about an eating disorder as soon as possible, that I could go on forever. The longer that an eating disorder, such as anorexia, goes untreated, the more severe it becomes.
A lot of the information out there is about caring for a child with an eating disorder, rather than an adult. Yet it’s so difficult when they’re an adult as you’re unable to intervene – you have to let them make their own mistakes and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Anorexia was never intended, never wanted and never fully understood. Yet in the September of my second year at university, I somehow found myself being taken on by an intensive outpatient treatment team.
Eating disorders grow in the dark. Sharing my story might help or maybe inspire someone else to keep fighting. It may even help me to get closer to that finish line where I am fully in control.
For the past year, I’ve been battling an eating disorder. Despite having seen multiple health professionals and had treatment for it, this is one of the first times I’ve ever really admitted I DO have an eating disorder.
At first it was a quiet niggle, an increase in talking about food and diet with friends, a new obsession over healthy eating, making excuses to skip meals. Any discreet way to avoid food. At least, I thought I was being discreet.
I always wanted to recover and get rid of the thoughts and feelings going around my head. I wanted to release some control and be able to live a 'normal' life again like I had before my eating disorder had reared its ugly head. I wanted to be 'normal'.