Success stories

“My name is Melissa. I live in Queensland, Australia, I am 24 and I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa last year, and have come a long way since then.

I have always had low self-esteem. I have also been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and depression, which I believe played a large part in the development of my eating disorder.

I moved out of home at 21 and was excited about the freedom of eating any food I wanted, and got carried away with the junk food and snacks. I loved food. This, however, caused me to gain weight fairly quickly. It wasn’t until I was at the highest I had ever weighed that I began researching health, fitness and weight loss, and started to count calories.

I was in a period of self-loathing over the way I looked, and it was around this time that I was first diagnosed with depression. This negative perception of myself motivated my weight loss, a little too much.

Over the next couple of years I became more and more obsessed with counting calories, controlling and restricting my food intake and any other weight loss methods I could find. I lost my love of food, my weight dropped rapidly, I was sick every day, I was underweight and dropping. I had developed anorexia nervosa.

This is a mental illness, but it often felt like an addiction. There was a certain high I would get when I had eaten very little that day, even though I physically felt awful. I always had to eat less, and the less I ate, the better the ‘high’ felt. I felt like I had achieved something good and that feeling fuelled it, along with body dysmorphia and very low self-esteem.

It took fainting and hitting my head on the tiles in my bathroom for me to get help from a doctor, because my boyfriend was worried I might have had a concussion. I was diagnosed a couple of weeks later after they monitored my weight, which kept dropping, and I was referred to a psychologist and dietitian who were very understanding and really made me feel comfortable, even though I felt embarrassed and afraid.

During recovery I realised that I hadn’t achieved anything good by restricting my food. The ‘high’ was not worth it. I was starving myself, I hated myself, my family and friends were worried about me and I needed to recover and I needed to be healthy.

It was a difficult journey, especially while working full time and studying, but I have recovered to a healthy weight now. I couldn’t have done it without support from family, friends, medical professionals and the trusty internet.

I still have bad days, but I hope this community will grow and turn those days into positive ones. We can beat this together.”