There are many ways to leave life, starving myself to death is not the way I want to go and I decided that when I was 19.

When I was 15, I began losing weight. It was easy. I was already really into sport, playing hockey and netball, running, cycling and anything else that was competitive. Gradually, and without a plan, I started cutting out food that had fat in it. I began saying I didn’t like chocolate and only eating sweets that were full of sugar but has the all important ‘Trace’ next to fat on the nutrition label. I whittled my breakfast down to one slice of toast which would be tossed aside as I ran for the bus. I spent my lunch money on sweets and magazines, and avoided the lunch hall by running around the sports field for half an hour. I am not sure how long it took, I think maybe a year but certainly by the time I was in my A’level years, I was in the habit of eating only one small meal a day and not missing a single chance to exercise.

I hated how my body looked. I was petrified of being fat and I was obsessed with all the things I had decided would protect me from putting on weight.

My mum had to watch silently as anorexia nervosa crept in and consumed me, knowing that if she spoke to me about it, I would be even more determined to do my own thing. I expect it’s quite common but sadly, my mum, the person closest to me, who loved me the most and wanted only the best for me, was the last person I would listen to when the disorder was controlling my choices.

At my worst, I was too thin to menstruate and I had only one bowel movement a week. I looked ill enough that teachers rang up Mum to let her know they had noticed I was losing weight. To clarify, this kind of involvement in the welfare of pupils in a rural secondary school in the nineties was not the norm.

Mum had noticed. How could she not? I wasn’t exactly stealth, there were dried up pieces of toast at the end of our drive and the snack food I once devoured when I came home from school was no longer on the shopping list.

I was a strong-willed, totally brainwashed teenage girl whose favourite movie was Pretty Woman and was regularly seeing pictures of Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford in media. At least, in those days it was just printed or the occasional TV programme. The 24/7 bombardment of social media on devices gives no safe space for a mind that is already full of self loathing. What probably began as a way of controlling something in my life when a lot of other things were happening outside of my control, had become another thing that was controlling me and separating me from the people who loved me the most.

Mum did what she could, including enlisting the help of a dietitian to try and talk some sense into me. I just manipulated the information they gave me and lost more weight. It was a friend’s mother, who was a nurse and somebody I trusted and crucially was not my mum who convinced me to meet with a counsellor to talk through what was undeniably disordered eating. I think by that time, I was so exhausted by the regime I was enslaved to and that no matter how much weight I lost on the scales, I only saw fat in the mirror that I finally admitted all was not OK and agreed to meet with a counsellor.

I don’t remember much of my sessions or even how many I had. I remember he warned me in our first session that if I was to get under a certain weight he would have me sectioned. For the first time, I realised what I was doing was dangerous and I never did go under that weight. Also, it was a target that I was in control of so it appealed. I am sure it’s not always like this and it might sound a little like a scene in a film, but there was a moment in one of our sessions where I connected my fear of putting on weight with a fear of being rejected. I was a child of divorced parents and I had gone through the trauma at a very young age without talking to anyone about how the decisions of others had made me feel. My child self had believed that she was no one’s first choice, and that at any point, someone who loved me would love someone more and I would be alone. I believed that what I wanted was not important or even considered. I was the youngest child in our blended family and I was also the least academic and the loudest spoken. I am pretty sure I was annoying as a child and a teenager. Siblings and parents asked me to be quiet, show less emotion, don’t be so open with your feelings, stop being so loud Claire, you’re too much.

Shrinking my physical self was possibly a dysfunctional response to the request to be less. Of course they weren’t asking me to disappear but a sense of not fitting in coupled with a universal embracing of heroin chic in the nineties worked out to be a dangerous combination for me.

One of the hardest parts of a mental health disorder like anorexia is that there is no quick fix, no medicine that will bring you back to full health. It takes conviction and determination to sink into it and it takes the same to pull yourself out of it. The bad news for any parent with a child suffering from this, is whilst you can get help and you can support your child every step of the way, they will only be healed if they choose to be.

I can’t credit one thing that got me to stop believing the lie that eating was the enemy. Counselling helped to identify hurts that fed the lies. Patient family members and friends who kept telling me the truth and demonstrating normal eating were important. Prayer was a big part of my recovery. Someone falling in love with me who brought calm assurance that he would never leave me helped too. But ultimately, it was the decision I made one time right about my nineteenth year, and then over and over again for several years after, to not measure my worth by standing on scales, to face the fear and eat when I was hungry and trust the truth that my body best served me when it was healthy, not starved. It was not a smooth path back to ‘normal’. Physical health came years before mental health. I am proud of the work I did and I am so grateful I chose a life that includes the love of food, because it has filled me with joy in all the different ways food can.

Now that I am a parent of teenagers and I listen to mothers who have children that are struggling with eating, I wish that I knew the secret of how it can be avoided or some quick fix to get them back on track. Devastatingly, I don’t think it works that way. Every person is unique and how they get to the place of choosing to starve themselves is particular to them, so will the road to recovery be entirely their own. I can see that it’s excruciatingly scary to watch a loved one suffer and know that you can’t fix it for them. I thought that my mum was being dramatic when she told me years later that she would lie awake at night worrying that I would die from it, but I can see how she got there. It feels so out of control.

My message of hope is that it only takes one decision to get better, repeated over and over again, to stamp back the fears and destroy the pattern of destruction. Make it once, then make it again. Eventually it becomes a habit to choose life and the fear has no power any more.