How do you explain to people why you suddenly decide to stop eating? Why can’t other people see you the way you see yourself?

These are the two most common questions faced by people with the eating disorder anorexia as their bodies become ever thinner until they resemble emaciated skeletons and, in some extreme cases, starve to death.

Of course there are no easy answers to these questions. Anorexia is an extremely complicated and dangerous disease. It is an eating disorder that has its origins in the patients’ own minds. Uncovering the source of this horrifying disease has long baffled families and medical professionals trying to deal with its tortured victims. However, I would like to offer an insight into the difficult struggle of a single person that lasted for more than 20 long years.

For me, it all started quite simply with Charlie’s Angels. Yes, I can definitely pinpoint the beginning of my obsession with bringing these three thin, small-breasted dynamic beauties to the small screen. Now I know you may be thinking, ‘but anorexia isn’t about some deep, terrible family trauma.’ Well, that seems to be the popular way of thinking these days, but honestly, I don’t necessarily subscribe to that opinion. While it may be true in some cases, for me and I suspect many other young women it simply stems from a desire to be thin. There is nothing more complicated than that. I wanted to be skinny. I wanted to look like Farrah Fawcett Majors.

And so it began, eating less and less until I was getting by on a bowl of All Bran and a tube of Smarties. Walk miles and miles a day. Dancing around the house for hours on end in a frantic effort to burn calories and take laxatives and diuretics morning, noon and night. And even when it was under 6 stone, I couldn’t convince myself that it was skinny enough. Unfortunately for me, I was one of those people cursed with a big belly, so no matter how much weight I lost, my belly always seemed out of proportion to the rest of my body and made me feel fat. Even when Charlie’s Angels were a distant memory, the battle continued on a daily basis.

Of course, this kind of lifestyle could not continue. I had a child to care for and a home to care for and somehow managed to avoid self-destruction. However, eating disorders like anorexia never really go away. They scold you and threaten to drag you down when you least expect it, but in my case, I decided to use the experience to try and figure out why I fell into their clutches in the first place. My problem was, and still is, my stomach. To be more precise, swelling. Bloat has a way of making even skinny people appear fat. It’s a strange complaint where the sufferer may appear to have a perfectly flat stomach first thing in the morning and then for some reason blow up like a balloon at night. No matter how thin his arms and legs are and even though his shoulder blades stick out through his clothes, when his stomach is bloated, he still feels fat. So I decided to channel my energies into trying to figure out the cause of my problem and maybe come up with a solution. Lucky for me, I finally managed to isolate the culprit that was causing my bloating. I found that by following a careful diet I could manage my symptoms and found that although I am over 5 pounds heavier now than at those low points in my life, I actually look quite well proportioned and relatively slim. This led me to record my findings in my book The Flat Belly Diet.

So there you have it. Although this may sound like an oversimplification of a serious and potentially dangerous illness, it is a true account of my own personal experience. There can be many reasons why someone becomes anorexic and for some it is a lifelong spiral with no happy outcome. But if you are suffering or caring for someone who is, I hope this story shows that some of us have found a way out and there is light at the end of the tunnel.

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