I first started losing weight when I was thirteen and I remember it very well. I was on holiday, we were on holiday in Switzerland visiting friends, and I remember saying to myself, Now when I get back from my holiday, I’m going to lose some weight So I did that because I was, I was quite, you know, a chubby child so I had weight to lose without anybody noticing, and when I first started losing weight people just thought I was losing my puppy fat and thought nothing of it, and it wasn’t until, it just spiralled out of control really and I became very driven and very determined just to keep losing weight, and eat as little as possible and exercise as much as possible. And it was when I was fourteen, my sister said to my Mum, Do you realise Stephanie hasn’t eaten anything today You know, it came to dinner time, I didn’t want my dinner either and my Mum thought, Neither she ha.

The first thing that I can really remember in terms of eating going a bit wrong was I’d just finished my GCSE exams, so this was when I was sixteen, and shortly after that well, after finishing we had a very long summer holiday, longer than I’d ever had before because the exams ended and until sixth form started there was quite a long break. And during that time, I was well, looking back I can see it now but at the time I wasn’t really aware, that I sort of starting engaging in a lot more exercise than I would usually do.

And also I started cutting back on what I was eating and I think it was it was because I felt like I’d put on maybe a bit of weight over the exam period, which I don’t know whether I had or not. I mean probably had because I was just sitting revising. And over the summer months it sort of that sort of pattern increased so I was gradually doing more and more exercises and eating less and less.

And by the time I started six form in the following September I had lost a substantial amount of weight and I think when I got to six form it was a very different structure to what I was used to. There was no, well, not many lessons. There was a lot of sort of study periods and I think that sort of made me feel perhaps out of control and so, because of that, I started, you know, I was really started increasing the exercise even more, restrict, controlling what I was eating even more to kind of make up for the lack of control I felt I had over my sort of school work.

And at the time I had a boyfriend, who noted that things weren’t right. I’d lost a lot of weight. I was obviously, he could tell I wasn’t eating and I was engaged in quite a lot of exercise and I was not myself. I was very miserable, I felt I was quite tearful. I was really focusing very much more even more than usual on my studies. So really just studying the whole time.

So eating disorder was really taking over and I was getting weaker and weaker and less and less like myself. I was still going to school and really focussing on my studying and my parents didn’t know what to do.

Shortly after like my fourteenth birthday I was wasn’t fitting in very well with my friendship group at school, and I felt very academically pressured in the school that I was in, like I’d always try really hard in my school work, but I never felt as though it was good as my friends’ work and I started to feel like quite competitive about that. But it was getting me down that I wasn’t doing as well as them, and especially as I wasn’t fitting in and it felt very lonely.

In, like I was best friends with a girl, but we stopped being friends and a new girl came to the school and took my place as this girl’s best friend. And she was like quite skinny and she was really clever, so I started to feel like maybe if I’m more like her people will like me more because she was popular and everything.

So I got really interested in diets and stuff and I started to like count how much fat I was eating. But it wasn’t really working and I was getting more and more unhappy. So I started going on the internet and found all thinspiration sites and stuff and I started to use them a lot. I signed up to lots of them and would talk to other people on them.

And from there I just got really obsessed with what I was eating and I’d start to write, because on some of the websites it would say things like, write down what you’re eating. So you could like cut out things the next day. So I used to obsessively record everything that I ate and drank, even when it was just things like water.

And I’d started to halve it, and it got to the point where I was throwing my lunch away at school and like my Mum obviously didn’t know that, but she started to click on that I wasn’t eating all my meals and stuff. So she took me to the doctors, and the doctor said to me that I had anorexia but my Mum didn’t tell the appointment was for like to getting a diagnosis for that, she told me it was because I’d been a bit ill, so I just went along with it.

I remember just eating a massive Chinese on my own, purely on my own. And I’d had, you know, I just, I’d got to the point where I sort of was rewarding myself I guess for having lost lots of weight, so I went, Okay I’m gonna have a Chinese and I didn’t just have a Chinese, I had about a three person portion of Chinese. And then felt so horrendously guilty for doing it and I remember doing it, I still remember that, that evening. Just what, I wonder if I made myself sick if it’s gonna make a difference

So I did, and it was a purely a one off. I then went back into the, just eating, I say healthily, dieting, carrying on. And I didn’t do it again for, for a long time. And then I wasn’t getting the comments again I guess, or I wasn’t losing weight as much as I wanted to and so it happened again. And, and somehow, I don’t, I can’t even pinpoint when it became a habit that was happening at all the time, on a daily basis. I can’t remember when that started. It, I just remember suddenly realising one day, this is happening everyday now, it’s, this is a little out of control. it’s not just a, I’ve eaten lots and it’s a one-off. This is, I’ve eaten hardly anything all day and yet I still want to do it, which is obviously an unhealthy aspect of it.

And soon before I guess I knew it became a habit. A habit that my parents worked quite a lot and aren’t often home, so it wasn’t anything hard for me to hide. Again at work, I worked for a very lenient company where if I disappeared off to a toilet, you know, so on for a little period of time it wasn’t really noticed. So that it just became an essential part of my life and at the age of 19 it, it was just part of my life. I would eat a lot of food and then I would make myself sick. To the point where I stopped the dieting. It was having the effect I wanted it to so I was eating as I pleased, gorging on food if I wanted to and then obviously purging myself in the evenings or at lunchtimes at work.

And it did after I’d say about a year, you know I was still 19, probably coming onto 20, that’s when I first realised it had become a part of my life and I remember it scaring me. And thinking actually this isn’t normal. This isn’t actually what other people do. And then kind of wanting to, to talk about it, but not wanting anyone close to me, friends or family, knowing what I was doing or what was happening, you know, they, they were congratulating me for weight loss which as far as they were concerned was down to me dieting and exercising, not down to the real reason.

When I got to about 13 I kind of like discovered the internet, and then was all into the whole, dieting sort of phase. I was, my friends, everyone around me at school at that age, everyone wants to lose a bit of weight, everyone’s so interested in the media, interested in celebrities, they, they’re losing all that weight, they want to lose it, and I started all these fad diets, all these silly little things and I came a bit involved with some stuff on the internet, the whole pro-anorexia sort of thing, and that kind of just took me into the grips of my eating disorder.

I started binging and purging and just restricting my calorie intake, and it got to a point where I just, I couldn’t go into school because I was so lethargic, I was so, I was just so down, and I just kind of spent all my days pretty much on the internet, not focussing on my school work, and it was, it just became this whole big obsession.

Then increasingly started checking fat content, not really concerned with calories, but obsessively checking fat content, saturated fat contents on the back of packets. Anything that I was eating, components of what might be going into dinners and things, and so this is all kind of in, towards the end of year 6.

And lost a lot of weight over that, and the kind of interim change between primary school and secondary school. And then it just sort of continued really, I just got more and more acute with what I was, what I was eating and checking packets. Checking labels, making sure, getting very controlling over what my parents were giving me, and going to the supermarkets with them, all that kind of thing.

And then it just, it just progressed really on a very restrictive path. So you know I’d just cut out all sweet foods and thinkI tried to eliminate basically every possible element of fat in my diet so I would just have the bare minimum. And that was, it was really from kind of, it was sort of year 8 and 9 where it got really bad.