I’m running a 100km total ultra in July 🫣

Eating disorders have been such a significant part of my life. I’ve felt the deep and lasting effects of them both first and second hand. There’s no denying that detection needs to be earlier, prevention needs to be improved and care needs a lot more investment.

I’ve also seen that everyone’s journey is different.

Currently my mum, 57, has just moved to a care home. She’s lived with anorexia since the age of 17, and whilst at some points in her journey she may have appeared healthy to the outside eye it’s never gone away. Growing up I never saw her eat a normal meal, and she made a lot of comments about her weight, smaller was always better. This can become a learning process for a child and then adolescent, developing beliefs and behaviours that will shape their relationship with food and their body as it did with mine. I remember as mum got more mentally unwell the weight would deteriorate alongside. The past few years she’s really gone down hill. Numerous hospital visits and she’s just been in for 2 months. She’s lost her hair and teeth to anorexia, and her social and work life succumbed to the wider effects of the illness too. She’s pretty bedbound now with a peg feed. It’s heartbreaking to see how a life can be slowly sucked out of someone so intelligent and loving by an illness we should be able to do more for.

My older sister started to really become controlled by anorexia and bulimia at 16. She was such a good dancer and it took that from her. She ended up in an ED unit and almost had organ failure due to how little her body had left. But it’s not just the physical aspects. It affects the wider relationships. It’s taken a while to rebuild our relationship and trust as anorexia is like a controlling partner, it makes you lie and hide things and really takes over an entire individual and that can really effect the people around them. I’m so proud of my sister who has been able to recover, and has two amazing girls I get to call my nieces. But she was warned that the long term impacts could affect her fertility window after so long without a period. No one can give her back the years she lost to it but she is proof that there can be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Me - having a mother and then an older sister with anorexia was definitely an influence on my relationship with food. My experience was a bit different and I was very addicted to exercise alongside becoming very obsessive and restrictive with food from as young as early teens. This lasted years but I was never picked up by doctors as I never met the ‘criteria’ for any ED help. It’s taken years of trying to overcome habits and see the long term effects my mum is experiencing to keep me from letting an ED take over me.

To ‘qualify’ for ED help you need a BMI of 16. There is some seriously underdeveloped areas for help, such as Northern Ireland. There’s a lack of wider care for family who are left to deal with a changing loved one and the emotional and financial effects that develop as repercussions of an ED. There’s not enough checking in for other family members developing behaviours even thought there’s clearly a genetic link.

I’m probably not going to make a massive difference to my mums health with this. But I just want to help prevent others wondering down the path.