That is the great trick of the eating disorder. She is a siren sitting atop wave-splashed rocks, a demon a disguised as a beautiful woman. She coaxes you in with promises of relief – from OCD, from anxiety, from past trauma, from self-loathing, from anything that you’ve long prayed would go away – but once she has you, she’ll drown you without a second thought.

When I finally started to try to eat again, my anorexia morphed into bulimia. This is a far more common phenomena than most people know. You see, when you’re anorexic, your body doesn’t know that you’re starving yourself on purpose. Why would it? Self-induced starvation goes against the basic human instinct of trying to stay alive. So, when you suffer from anorexia, your body goes into survival mode. It thinks that you’re in a period of famine, and it does whatever it needs to do to keep you alive. But once you finally start eating again – and I mean really eating, full meals and not just half-portions here and there – your body thinks that you’ve finally come out of that famine. So, what does it do?

It starts to binge.

The scariest part of bulimia is the lack of self-control that you feel. I would unwrap a mini chocolate bar, telling myself that I would just have one as a dessert after lunch. But once that rush of sugar hit my mouth, I couldn’t stop. I had to have another. And another. And another, until suddenly all fifty pieces of candy in the bag are gone. That’s when the shame washes over you. That’s when you head for the toilet.

“My eating disorder was about so much more than being thin”