MY STORY.

MY BULIMIA STRUGGLE.

It was over 25 years ago that I last stood bent over the loo, retching to (hopefully) get up all the food I had recently consumed.

You'd think I'd remember such a truly momentous occasion because for sure, it was one of the most amazing days of my life. However, it passed without celebration or even acknowledgement; I'd promised myself so many times, I would never do 'it' again — that this was 'The Last Time', I never recognised it was actually "The Last Time". And so it passed unnoticed, no doubt, in a barrage of self-recrimination and disgust.

For years I struggled to stop bingeing and purging and yet, for over 15 years, I lived with bulimia in varying degrees of intimacy. Years that should have been some of the most memorable times of my life are not much more than a blur because I was too busy caught up and trapped in my own private war to notice.

BULIMIA: MY PRIVATE HELL.

As a successful model, with agents in London, Paris, Hamburg and Tokyo, I was living the sort of life many people dream of. However, in reality, my life was somewhat less glamorous.

Behind the painted smiles and faked happiness I hid a shameful secret, an unrelenting struggle with this 'thing' — that I later discovered was called 'bulimia' — and wherever I went in the world, 'it' came too.

I was convinced there was something seriously wrong with me, but what? Back then with no Internet, there was no Google to go and secretly consult. And perhaps surprisingly, given the world I moved in, other than hearing that the singer Karen Carpenter had "starved herself to death" (and I was hardly doing that!), I don't recall any talk about eating disorders.

BULIMIA: MY 'LOYAL' FRIEND.

MY ERRONEOUS PERCEPTION.

MY MIRACLE: BULIMIA FREEDOM.

But one day, as quietly as bulimia had snuck into my life, it was gone.

Nonetheless, at the time, I gave no thought as to what could have happened; I was just so happy to be free of "it".

Without the 'noise' in my head and the time-consuming behaviours, I got on with my life. The world seemed a far friendlier place. Life wasn't such a roller coaster and I felt more in control. I enjoyed my work again. I enjoyed going out with friends for dinner. I felt "safe" with food in my flat, even once "forbidden" foods.

Admittedly it took a bit of time to stop being fussy about what I ate, but when I truly stopped dieting and instead ate what I liked in satisfying amounts at breakfast, lunch and dinner, some weird things happened: Not only did my weight stabilise, I also found myself in a body I really liked and felt 'thinner' than I'd ever done, even at my lowest weight.

I can happily eat any food without angst — as I've done many times over the years: When trekking in remote parts of Peru and Kenya, horseback riding across the Ecuadorian Andes, at a friend's house, in a restaurant or the ones I cook myself that sometimes don't meet expectations. These days I'll take the excitement of adventure and enjoying the love, laughter and company of loved ones and friends any day, over worrying about what I eat.

MY WILDERNESS YEARS.

But my transformation didn't happen overnight. Although I'd stopped the bulimic behaviours of binging and purging, my self-esteem and confidence had taken a severe knock and when I stopped modelling in my thirties I felt cast adrift, lost. I didn't seem to know who I was.

Everyone around me seemed to have their lives handled. My friends had moved on, getting married, having kids or in careers that were taking off. I felt totally inadequate and ill-equipped and had no idea what to do.

With no formal training I spent a number of years in dead-end jobs finding solace and excitement in a social whirl; looking for love in all the wrong places and using alcohol and recreational drugs to make myself feel better. Luckily, since my 'cure' for feeling better wasn't working — in fact quite the reverse — I started working as a PA to an up-and-coming property developer. This gave me a sense of direction and allowed me to realise some previously untapped talent and skills. After a few years I opened an Interior Design company and later began investing in property.

However, my heart was never really in any of it. So, when a friend suggested I join her in participating in The Landmark Forum I jumped at the chance. After that weekend it was as if everything had totally changed: I saw life through a totally different lens and I liked what I saw — and so began my journey of personal development and training.

SHOCKED: BULIMIA — FACTS OR FICTION?

Several years on I was chatting with a psychotherapist — we were both on the same training course to be life coaches — and I mentioned I'd once had bulimia. To my surprise, she told me you never really recover. When I said I absolutely had, she asked how I'd done it.

The thing was I couldn't answer her — I hadn't got a clue.

That night, for the first time ever I put "Bulimia" into Google to see if I could find some answers — and I was shocked. I couldn't believe how big the problem was and how many people were struggling. Just as the therapist had said, I was reading things like, "you never really recover", "it's a life-long battle" and that "you'll always have to be careful around food".

To me this seemed so wrong. Some 15 years had passed since I last binged and purged. Not once in that time, despite some very difficult and painful periods in my life, had I experienced the urge or even the desire to binge or purge.

And the more I read the more confused I got. What was this thing called bulimia really all about? There were so many causes cited and so many were at odds with each other. What had I actually recovered from? And perhaps more importantly — with recovery rates appearing so appallingly low — how had I recovered?

SURPRISED — AND DELIGHTED.

With the knowledge and insights I'd gained from training and qualifying in various coaching and healing modalities, I picked apart my bulimia years and plotted my journey backwards — from where I was to back where it had all started — to work out how, against the odds, I had recovered.

As I joined up the dots, I saw fundamental mistakes I'd innocently made that had kept me trapped in a living hell, struggling unnecessarily for years. I saw connections between things that — had I not struggled with bulimia and recovered myself — would probably on the surface appear unrelated or insignificant. But these seemingly unrelated and insignificant things were in fact key to my eventual freedom from bulimia.

It appeared to me that recovery didn't have to be so hard and painful. It didn't have to be so long or so miserable. It didn't have to be the end of your dreams of having the body you desire — and probably more importantly, it was possible to discover some pretty amazing things about yourself along the way. Things that would have a positive and powerful impact in all areas of your life, moving forwards.

However, what I'd been reading online painted an entirely different picture. It seemed to me that rather than helping anyone, much of the information on bulimia and bulimia recovery could actually be keeping people stuck. I wondered whether people were simply getting the wrong information about bulimia and how to recover, and therefore coming to the wrong conclusions about what they needed to do.

So, I created a recovery program that reflected my own journey and began — somewhat tentatively — coaching people through it, because to be honest, I did have some self-doubt. I mean who was I to be doing this? I wasn't a therapist or counsellor and had no medical background, so I wondered if my own experience and what I'd learnt was going to be enough. But I'm so glad I didn't listen to that "little voice in my head" — because what I shared with others, worked for them too.