I guess everything happens for a reason, but when your life starts to crumble and implode you begin to wonder why me? I will let you in to a little secret, my life was boring. There was nothing to write about. Nothing exciting had happened in my life. Until……..

Until one day my life changed completely. I tell people that I’m not sure when it all changed, but that’s a lie. I know exactly when it all changed, and how, but I don’t see what telling doctors and therapists is going to do. It all changed because of a so called friend introducing me to calories. She began to obsess about them, always analysing about how many calories food had in it. Yet she still ate foods that were high in calories. She didn’t care. But she planted a seed in my head. I would go home and, before I ate anything, I would check how many calories it had in it. I counted every single calorie I ate and then burned them off. At first it wasn’t bad. I just cut down a little on the junk food, nothing major, but that phase didn’t last. I was so fixated over calories, especially how much I ate that day. All my brain thought about was calories and when I was going to next eat: breakfast – cereal with a little drop of milk = 250 calories; lunch – small ham baguette = 200 calories; dinner –  a Marks and Spencer’s low-calorie ready meal = 200 calories, exercise = 200 calories. Total = 450 calories. Sometimes I would eat pudding, but pudding for me is different from you. My pudding would be a ten-calorie jelly that would last me over an hour as I savoured it. My plan would be that, the longer I took to eat it, the less chance of me being hungry later and wanting more food to add to my calorie count. I made sure I ate under 700 calories a day and starved myself of the nutrients that I needed. I was hungry at first, but then I got used to the feeling of always being hungry. I won’t lie to you the feeling of hunger never left but you get used to it and learn to live with it.

My life wasn’t as simple as counting calories though. It came with a lot more difficulties. This experience came with thoughts, thoughts that weren’t welcome but decided to stay. I began to look at myself in a different way and decided I didn’t like what I could see. I could see this ugly, spotty, fat girl standing in front of me and, every time I looked in the mirror, I saw that girl and I just couldn’t bear to look in the mirror or even at myself without being so disgusted at the girl looking back at me. I would grab my fat and push it in and pull it about and think about how skinny I could be. I was only eleven and I hated myself so much. I wanted to change the way I looked; I wanted to be skinnier and prettier. Maybe if I was, people wouldn’t hate me so much. Maybe people would accept me then. Maybe my friends might actually like me. I felt so alone, as if I had nobody to talk to. So I controlled the one thing I could. My eating.

As you may have guessed, I suffer from an eating disorder, Anorexia Nervosa to be specific. I am now fifteen and I was diagnosed with Anorexia at the age of thirteen. Anorexia is one of those conditions you may see a TV character suffering with, and you feel so bad and you can’t imagine how that character may be feeling and you feel so sorry for the character. But you think that will never happen to you. That’s what I used to think until I was diagnosed with it. It came as a shock to me and my family. However everyone around me could see it was happening. They could see I was slowly killing myself. I became so skinny you could see my ribcage very clearly without me breathing in; I had no fat around my bones and I was still losing weight at this point, still starving myself because I still saw fat around me. But nobody else saw this fat. Just me. I was so cold every day. Even on sunny days I would be wrapped up because I was freezing. At nights, after school, I was so cold that I would wear my cozy, fluffy pyjamas including fluffy socks, with a onesie over that, with a jumper over that and I was still cold so I would sit next to my radiator to get warm. But as soon as I moved away from the radiator, I would be freezing again. My hair would come out in clumps and I would cry my eyes out because I thought I was going bald and I didn’t realise why this was happening. I would cook really high-calorie foods for friends and family but never ate it myself because it felt good to see others eating calories and I wasn’t. It was empowering that I could be next to food and not have to eat it.

I was hospitalised on the 20th of May 2015, my ‘half birthday’. The journey to the hospital was nerve-wracking. I didn’t understand what was going on. There was nothing wrong with me, so why was I going to hospital? I was so confused. When I arrived, the nurses slipped a patient identifier on my emancipated arm. I was officially ill. Soon after, I was approached by the head of the department and she confirmed my worst fear. I was dying, I was killing myself. It was a form of suicide. I just kept thinking that I was going to be with my gran up in heaven sooner than expected. About seventy years sooner than expected. I looked over at my mum with tears in her eyes and I promised myself that I wouldn’t die this way and not this young. I was discharged a few days later to recover in my own home with the support of an eating disorder nurse and my mum and yeah, recovery was so scary. Eating more calories, getting my blood taken twice, sometimes three times a week-but most of all, I didn’t get to see anyone. Life grew really difficult for me. I became severely depressed, wanting to end my life, wishing that everything would just stop, all the thoughts and feelings. But most of all I wanted to stop gaining weight. I had strived to lose weight for so long and now my worse nightmare was happening-I was putting weight on. I would cry myself to sleep as I just wanted it all to end.

Fortunatley, with the support of my eating disorder nurse and my mum, I eventually emerged from that long tunnel of despair. Looking back now at all the challenges I have faced in the past two-and-a-half years, I sometimes feel overwhelmed, but then I remind myself how far I’ve come. The way I do this is to look at the wristband, bearing my name, that I wore in hospital: it is the symbol of the part of my life that I am eager to put behind me. I cannot claim that my battle against the demon of anorexia is over, but what I have come to terms with through this journey is that anorexia is my disease it doesn’t define me as a person, it is not who I am. I will always have anorexia in my life but its about learning to control it and not let it take over.