With my two best friends by my side the quest for perfection continued. I started restricting and vomiting anything else. I ended up losing 6kgs in a week, something I would have once been proud of, but instead I ended up feeling worse than ever. Along with this I started to develop anxiety and had my first of a series of panics attacks. First you lose your breath and no matter how much you breathe it’s still not enough, then the room feels as though it has collapsed onto you and there’s no escape, with your heart racing one hundred miles an hour and your body in an uncontrolled state of shaking, it seems like an ordeal that will never end, or one that will result in your death. Needless to say, the first time I honestly thought I was having a heart attack.
The anxiety got so bad I couldn’t leave the house and spent most of my days in bed watching tv. For me this was a huge turning point, I had just started studying for my degree and was missing so many classes that I was on the path to failure. This motivated me to seek help from a psychiatrist. At first I rebelled against the idea of telling some stranger my embarrassing history with food. I was ashamed at the types of food I had been shoveling into my mouth and more at what had been coming out.
Today was my first appointment with a local dietitian, about a month after I started my weekly appointments with the psychiatrist and to be honest it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve been slipping back into my old habits, back to Mia and Ana. I know it’s all in my mind, but they always appear to love me unconditionally, they’re always there with open arms just begging me to come back to them. It makes recovery hard to stick to. It’s a constant war in my mind between logic and obsession, one where the enemy has the unfair advantage.

I’ve added a photo of myself as I am to date; 60kgs, reasonably healthy, but still stuck in the clutches of Ana and Mia. Hopefully after a week of what the dietitian calls ‘mechanical eating’ (3 small meals and 2 snacks a day) I will be able to start winning this war.

-Love Alice xx