|  | Helen from Crediton was told her osteoporosis was so bad, she had the bones of a 70-year-old woman.
"I decided I didn't deserve a hot meal every day, I felt I shouldn't have anything cooked".
Helen recalls the moment she made the decision not to eat. She was just nine.
"I remember feeling I don't deserve that, I shouldn't have that, I should have cereal or something uncooked. I felt I didn't deserve cooked meals," said Helen.
The bizarre thing to realise about anorexics is that most of them are not trying to be thin.
They are just using not eating as a way of dealing with emotional issues festering inside them.
Helen says she was always trying to punish herself. She thought she was a bad person.
Bad because she thought she'd got something wrong at school or didn't get as high a mark in a test as she had expected.
 | | Helen's weight dropped to less than four and a half stone |
Her punishment was exercise, she became exercise obsessed.
She'd swim 150 lengths before school, she'd do 3 hours in the gym, she'd go on a 5 mile run, and if she still wasn't happy with herself, she'd make it 10 miles.
And all this was done on just half a grapefruit and three chocolate biscuits; her entire daily diet.
She says she used to find going to a supermarket a terrifying ordeal. She says it was as if food were spiders.
"I was just terrified of it. It was like things on the shelves were live and might leap off and might potentially eat me," she explained.
"Although I know realistically that wasn't the case, it used to overwhelm me. I used to feel that in going food shopping I had in fact eaten the food."
Helen had to spend all her savings, £6000, on private treatment and counselling until help became available on the NHS.
When her weight dropped to less than four and a half stone, she went for a bone scan.
She was told her bones were as brittle as those of a 70-year-old woman.
The doctors said her osteoporosis was so bad, if she didn't start eating properly, she'd be in a wheelchair by the time she was 30.
She started to improve. But then, Helen went through a very emotional period in her life.
Normally she would starve herself to try to numb the pain, but she says this time, because she was determined not to lose weight again, she self-harmed instead.
She slashed her arms repeatedly with a scalpel blade. She was so full of self-hatred, she was determined to abuse the only part of her body that she actually liked.
"I really hated myself, I wanted to punish myself," she said.
"My arms were a bit of my body that I didn't dislike, so it was almost like I had to punish myself all the more by doing a part of my body that I actually liked."
When she looks back now, she can hardly believe what she did to herself.
Today she is putting weight back on slowly, thanks to her counselling and also to the support of her mother. She still finds it terrifying to eat alone, so mum is always with her at meal times.
Getting through a meal can take up to an hour and a half.
She explained how she recently set herself a target to eat a yoghurt when her parents were out.
But after two spoonfuls, she ran in panic to the bathroom and cleaned her teeth for 20 minutes.
Helen says anorexia is illogical. She says people who control their eating think they are in control, but she says in reality, anorexia is in control.
She hates the way anorexia means she has wasted her life so far and wishes she could get back the lost.
But she seems to be on the mend and at only 23, hopes she can reverse the damage she's already done to her body.
Helen knows every day will be a battle with food, probably for the rest of her life, but she's determined to turn her life around. |
