Ayisha shares her reflections on how her eating disorder affects her relationship to her Muslim faith, family, and marriage.
Our supporter Amy talks through recovery from her eating disorder, understanding its roots, and regaining control of her life.
Our supporter Mayuri shares some of her top tips for being kinder to yourself during your eating disorder recovery journey.
A mother shares her family's experience of her daughter's transition from school to university with an eating disorder.
I first learned what a calorie was before I started nursery school. Not a unit of energy, not something we need to keep us alive, but something to evade, something dangerous that hid in food and was to be avoided at all costs
To this day, my relationship with food is a complex one, but I am very much of the belief that next year will be better, and the year after that will be even better.
The first time my mum worried I might have an eating disorder, I was 12. I was a competitive athlete, and a knee injury prevented me from training. I was terrified of gaining weight – I’d been afraid of being ‘fat’ throughout my childhood.
When lockdown came into force – what seems like a whole lifetime ago – I struggled. Like many people who experience eating problems, I felt so threatened by the changes in routine, the limited availability of certain foods, the massive uncertainty of it all
I want to shed some light on diet culture and what it drove me to do to myself for eight years. I will never get those eight years back, but what I do know is that I will never put myself through all the self-inflicted pain it took in order to look a certain way.
In the present chaos of COVID-19, I write these words from my own personal story as a reminder to your precious self that there is light in the midst of the uncertainty, confusion and calamity.
Now, I’m having to source ingredients and make food-related decisions in the moment, thus shaking me from my self-imposed reverie. This, added to my constant fear of someone coughing on me next to the tubs of Hellmans makes what should be a straightforward activity into a frantic, emotionally charged scenario.