General Article ‘I was lucky to stay alive’ – the truth about adult eating disorders

Topic Selected: Eating Disorders Book Volume: 390

With The Crown portraying Princess Diana’s eating disorder, other sufferers explain how they have battled to get treatment.

By Rosa Silverman

When Aimee Yates first began to lose weight, around the age of 30, nobody was too alarmed. Yates had a good job with the NHS and her life seemed to be on track, but she was becoming increasingly anxious as her friends began settling down, having children and buying properties. She was deriving a growing sense of relief from controlling what she ate.

‘I felt quite ineffective and couldn’t control my life and achieve the things other people were,’ she says. ‘Though I wasn’t consciously wanting to lose weight, I very much didn’t want my weight to go up, and my fear of my weight going up led to it going down. Without me realising it, my meals became smaller, my diet more restrictive.’

Before developing anorexia, she had weighed about eight stone. By the time the eating disorder landed her in hospital, she was four-and-a-half stone. 

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