Yeah it is really hard. Because when you’re totally consumed you feel like getting better would make things worse and maybe at the start of recovery it will feel scary and completely out of control and like it’s a lot safer to stay eating disordered and it does feel, yeah you do feel safer to start off with when things are changing, but as the changes kind of are put in place and you get used to them and you kind of make the first few steps, it does get easier. Cos I know when you first start recovery it’s very hard because you have to completely change everything that is your normality. And you have to kind of relearn what is good and kind of normal in healthy terms rather than normal in your kind of world.

And although it’s horrible and scary in the short term, in the long term it’s a lot better. And it opens up more doors to you than staying eating disordered and staying kind of ill.

And you said you had that sort of the health scare and that was a big factor?

Yeah. I think it just really, it brought me, I don’t know; back down to earth or something. Like it made me realise that your health is just so important, you know it really is your wealth and I think previously I’d kind of just taken it for granted, or not cared, I thought it just doesn’t matter. But it really made me think, you know, it’s, I, anything’s worth, I, I’d go to any lengths just to improve my health. Yeah.

And you were told that you have to also start putting on weight so that your fertility won’t be affected?

Oh that was a huge factor. Because yeah obviously I haven’t had any periods for years, and my gynaecologist was just like, she did a blood test and she said, your hormones are just like really low. Like indicating you’re going through the menopause. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is really scary Because that, above all in life, it sounds really strange, but my like goal above career, above everything, I wanna have children. And I guess it just made me think, you know, I have to, I have to have children, I have to do this. And I have to put on the weight. If that’s what I have to do, I have to do it.

To be honest like a lot of the time it’s just been I have to eat because I need the strength to do this. Like for example when I got made the deputy editor of the paper I had to like often do quite late nights on a Tuesday, a Monday and a Tuesday to get the paper done, for the deadline. And I just had to take like; I’d have to eat because I just got to the point where I just couldn’t concentrate anymore on like copy edit. Say I had to like sub-edit a, some news copy for somebody, I just had to eat because I just wouldn’t be doing my job properly anymore. So that was like the realisation that if I don’t eat, other people will think badly of my ability to do the job. And I just don’t want that. Like I want them to think I’m really good at my job. So like whereas in the past it would have been kind of I want to think that I’m really good at anorexia, now it’s more like important that there are other things in my life that I’m really good at. So that’s kind of that realisation and so I realise that I have to stop and eat.

Realising that other people, like I always thought that other people just don’t eat, like they just don’t make time for food. Other people just don’t eat whereas actually realising that people do say, I’m gonna stop for lunch is quite handy.

And then you came up with this different method, trying this contract thing. So how, who came up with it, did your Mum come across that cos she did research or

My Mum came up, came upon it, a similar thing on this American website it was their version of Beat, I can’t remember what it’s called now.

And she thought she’d, she’d discuss it with my psychiatrist and we talked about it and we did try it but it didn’t work at first because even though we were all, though we’d agreed to trust each other, my Mum still had quite a lot of angst over what I’d done in the past so she found it very hard to trust me. And then one evening we had an argument but this time my Dad kind of saw sense with me and realised that I could be trusted. And that, it was after then that it started to change properly.

So it required mutual trust to work? So you talked about the challenges, how did it like work just in practice?

At the end of each week my Mum would go through the week with a piece of paper and we’d put down tallies for the challenges that I’d done,

And I would be honest and tell her what I’d found challenging during that week. And it pretty much, you could tell by the honesty because otherwise I’d get to the next CAMHS session and lose weight as opposed to put on weight. And it did go up and down the weigh, but it was going up and down as opposed to down. So that’s how we dealt with the trust, and my Mum finally agreed that I wasn’t lying to her.

And I think as I did things as a challenge more and more they became less and less of a challenge until they didn’t become a challenge at all. And it’s still going on that contract. But now it’s down to like very, very small things that I find challenging now. And it’s mainly challenges like used to be having certain foods, but now it’s more doing certain things like going out with my friends, and making an effort to go out with friends and stuff.

And what were the first challenges like?

They were hard to do but I always knew that I was getting something out of it, and it was probably going to make me better as well. And it was more an attitude of I’ll give it a shot rather than I can’t, I’m not doing that.

So was it mainly about eating a certain amount or certain types of foods? Was it those sort of challenges?

Yeah it was sort of, types of food where you’ve eaten it, how, who you’ve eaten it with. Cos going out for a meal was a big challenge. Some challenges were worth more like staying the full day at school would have been like 2 points as opposed to 1 point which was half a day. And no points for not going at all.

And yeah it was social things, food things and exercise related things like if I said that I had some weights today but I didn’t do as many as I usually do cos I was actually tired then I’d get a point for being honest that I didn’t do all my weights cos I was tired.

I remember one time I was saying to a group of parents that, you might feel like you’re aiding the illness at first by giving in to what they want to eat but until they can come to terms with the food and to come to accept it, the fact that they’re just eating those things is important. So you might feel like they have to have a small portion and they have to have that but if you don’t give them that they might end up not eating at all cos they’ll panic. So it’s like at first you’ve got to stick to just the portion so if like the first week it is just such like a half slice of bread with their lunch then that’s all they increase. Everything else stays the same because they have to get used to that half slice of bread and once they’ve conquered that they can move on to something else. So at the start it is, until people really come to accept their illness and come to accept the treatment, in a way, you do feel like you’re aiding the illness along but it’s not, it’s just that that’s what you have to do at, at the start to kind of get your mind into the right place first.

I should think a lot of people forget that it’s, you know, it’s a mental illness and the changes have to happen here first before they can happen anywhere else.

I genuinely don’t really know what happened. I think I just probably because we’ve in a new environment it was, it was a holiday home in an area that we’d been going to for years, my parents, my dad had gone there you know as a child for years it’s been a bit of a family tradition really.

So we were kind of out the normal humdrum life at home experience, everyday routine, and I think it was probably a little kind of an element of that, so there was the freedom for me to try new things if I wanted to. I knew the opportunity was there. And other than that there really there’s nothing, there’s definitely no conscious thing that I can remember thinking, and being like, I’m going to change you know. Just, you literally just woke up one morning and was like, I think I’ll try I think it was like a packet of prawn cocktail flavoured crisps or something, or if I had a crisp which like sounds ridiculous but like at the time was just a breakthrough, you know, kind of my parents sat there in sort of stunned silence after I did it. And you know it was a big thing, but I can’t remember anything telling me to do it.

A few of my teachers and my CPN came back to visit me in hospital and they bought fruit so I tried like lychees for the first time which was quite good thing, I mean I know it’s only water but I was using my mouth to [laughs] to eat it which was good. But then I remember my CPN coming in and bringing in grapes and I would fiddle with the grape and then I’d kind of hide it under my duvet, I wouldn’t eat it that way. So I think food was brought round to me every day and to see whether I would eat any of it.

Probably be like a little mouthful and then and then that’s it. I’m not sure how it changed, I was, I think at the time in the Young Persons’ Unit when I came off the, the tube, it was kind of used as a backup so I would have to eat and they would sit with me for however long it took for me to eat a decent amount of food. So there was always that one on one support up until the point where I felt comfortable eating in a bigger environment.

I can remember I kept being asked to drink Ensure drinks, which are like high calorie drinks. And there was one evening where I again hadn’t eaten anything and I think I probably hadn’t drunk much either and I was sat down with one of the medical doctors and he sort of said, Look. You’re a sixteen-year-old girl, you’ve got a life ahead of you. You need to do this And I was still, I was in tears. I was not gonna drink this Ensure drink and he actually, got the cup and sort of forced me to drink it or some of it and I was, after that, I was very I was distraught. I was I felt totally out of control. I felt, you know, it was just. I felt, oh, it was horrible and I know, subsequently, I didn’t realise this til sometime later on, that because what this is not strictly what you should do apparently, they’d have to call my they had to call my parents in and tell them what had happened that I’d, basically, been forced to drink this thing. And my parents were, apparently, just like, That’s fine. That’s fine, you know. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it take [laughs]. And strangely enough, after that, I mean nothing, it wasn’t easy, but I was able to start having a tiny amount of food at each mealtime.

So just like I remember like the next morning I was asked to have half a Weetabix with a bit of milk and I was able to, you know, it took about three hours probably but I was able to eat it. And it built on from there until it got to the point where I was eating what everyone else was eating, meals, snacks. And so, in a way, that was kind of good that happened. But, at the time, obviously, it felt awful.

So did something sort of change in your head?

Well, I think it felt, it was, yeah, I mean I think it felt it was okay if you do it nothing, you’re not suddenly going to feel out of control. it’s, yeah.

It just felt like it had been so long and I’d not eaten anything and it just, I, in my mind, in my disordered mind, I thought, As soon as I start eating I’m going to worry that I’m not gonna be able to stop or I’m gonna put on lots of weight very quickly And I realised, actually, having this small amount of Ensure drink made no difference. I didn’t, you know, I felt no different. I didn’t feel better. I didn’t feel worse. It just, it was fine and I was still, you know, all my friends were very good and coming in and seeing me and I still had this incentive, this huge incentive, to get better because I wanted a normal life. So I was able to gradually start increasing my intake.

I mean to be to be brutally honest with you, I don’t think, I couldn’t have I couldn’t have seen myself surviving it really cos I couldn’t actually see, I couldn’t project myself forward and see a place, it, you know, past it. It was this, it just blocks off everything. There’s no future.

It grounds you in the present so I couldn’t I couldn’t really foresee a future where I’d got to this point. I mean I’ve achieved things and can now do things that I would never have considered, you know, a couple of years back that I would be able to do. Which is in turn inspiring that I would be able to get to, you know, this place, hopefully, where I can look back and say, you know, Back then I wouldn’t have imagined that I would be able to do this

I don’t feel like, I sometimes still worry about weight, but I don’t feel like constantly. Like I eat normally, and I can eat normally and not make myself sick. Like it’s not, it’s not that much of a, I don’t feel caught in it anymore. I don’t feel like every single moment of my life is kind of geared towards trying to be skinnier and be a different person.

So I’m happy. I’ve kind of managed to make, make the connect… like I still struggle with like confidence in like feeling fatter than everyone else and things like that but I’ve managed to make the connection between both that being skinny won’t make me happy and that like having this eating disorder won’t make me skinny. And I don’t feel like I have to, yeah I don’t feel like I have to make myself sick in order to be skinny. And I don’t feel like I have to make myself sick in order to push people away anymore.

Like I still struggle with an eating disorder but it’s nowhere near the trap that I was caught in and I do think that it can, and like probably will carry on getting better and just generally about life I feel a lot better now they’velike, through helping, me trying to get help for my eating disorder I was diagnosed with depression and that’s, like I feel quite lucky that that’s happened and like finding that there was a link between them and it’s an illness and it’s not my fault, and things like that. It really, yeah it helped me, it’s not just something that’s wrong with me and my problem, and for me being weak and silly and you know I struggle with these things, so, it’s good.