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anything else would be to accept our own victimhood.
     
    I can’t remember the precise moment when I became addicted to avoiding food. At 16, I was unhappy at school, my parents were getting divorced, and I was sickened by the urgency of the desires I felt, not just for food but for love, sex, work, excitement — normal human needs that I had learned were dangerous and wicked.
     
    I decided that it would be simpler to train myself not to want anything at all. At first, I cut out chocolate and treats; then it was carbohydrates and dairy, then breakfast, lunch and dinner.
     
    As my adolescent puppy fat began to pour away, friends and family complimented my new figure, reinforcing the message that good girls don’t eat. I felt light, pure and virtuous. It felt good; I wanted more. I started to spend hours doing strenuous exercise to burn off extra calories after school, and kept the supermodels’ motto “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” scratched into my hand to remind me that giving in to the terrible hunger pangs I felt was a sign of weakness. By the time I was 17, I was in hospital, so malnourished that I weighed less than a four-year-old.
     
    Because eating disorders are associated with fashion, it’s easy to believe that anorexia is a glamorous illness, a lifestyle choice made by rich or famous women whose only concern is to be thin enough to fit into next season’s tiny frocks. But there’s nothing glamorous about spending every waking second so hungry that you can barely stand. At no point, in the depths of my illness, did I crouch over a service station toilet bowl with two fingers down my throat, forcing myself to vomit up slimy lumps of the cracker I’d eaten for dinner and think, hey — I’m living the dream.
     
    The reality of life with anorexia is very far from a catwalk. The daily squelch and grind of an eating disorder is not only disgusting — it’s also deeply boring. My little sister, who was 12 at the time, told me: “You were no fun at all when you were ill. You were always talking about food, and even when you didn’t it was obvious you were thinking about it. It was just miserable to be in the same room as you, to be totally honest. You just weren’t you.”
     
    When you are anorexic, your world shrinks to the size of a dinner plate. You withdraw from your friends and family, you forget about the music and books and politics you used to love, you can’t concentrate on anything except where your next meal isn’t coming from. You tell yourself that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, but by the time you’ve made yourself that skinny, you’ve lost the ability to feel anything at all.
     
    Hospital was terrifying: the unfamiliar ward, the endless medical tests, the locks on the doors. The girl in the room next door, Lianne, was once a promising chemist; she used to spend her days cutting out pictures of fashion models for her scrapbook with an intravenous drip hooked to her wrist.
     
    At the end of my first week in hospital, Lianne ripped the feeding tube out of her wrist and ran away from the ward, determined to end her life. She was so weak that she collapsed on the bus into town. As I watched the ambulance pull up underneath my window, returning Lianne to hospital, I realised that I had a choice: I could either choose to stay ill and become like Lianne, living out a withered, damaged half-life of hospital stays and self-starvation, or I could dare to contemplate the possibility of a different life. That night, I ate my first proper meal in more than two years.
     
    Starting to eat again is extremely difficult when a part of you believes that you deserve to starve. It’s even more difficult when you’re surrounded by images of women who look just as scrawny and miserable as you do and told that this is the ideal to which you should aspire. The softer and curvier my body became, the more outsized I felt; compared to the perfect models on the cover of every magazine, the