Girl tells of battle with anorexia

Published on Tuesday 15 February 2011 08:53

WITH her shiny chestnut hair, sparkling eyes and smooth, flawless complexion, Lauren Knox sits in a city centre coffee shop and looks the picture of health.

&#149: Lauren Knox is healthy now, but a year ago she was so thin she wore a dress made for a ten-year-old to her 21st birthday party

Petite and pretty, she radiates confidence and talks excitedly about the music project she's leading with youngsters and the thrill of being able to put her own talent for singing to good use.

Yet just a year ago Lauren was desperately ill, her naturally tiny frame shrunken to mere skin and bones, her face a skeletal mask and her arms twig-like stalks. It was her 21st birthday party and Lauren, cleverly dressed to disguise the bones that protruded from her tiny frame, was emaciated and bony, desperately frail, pale and sickly.

Her weight had plunged to just over five stones in the space of a few months. Lauren didn't realise what she was doing - or, for that matter, why -but she was starving herself to death.

"I was wearing children's clothes, sizes made for ten-year-olds," she recalls. "It was such a struggle to find a dress I could wear for my 21st birthday party. I was so thin, mum insisted on buying me a shrug to cover my arms.

"I had no energy, I was so tired I'd have to go to bed at 8pm. At one stage I got a sickness bug, and remember lying in the bath and feeling every bump down my spine. That was the first time I feared death," she whispers. "I thought to myself that if I kept on going, then I would die".

Gripped by the eating disorder anorexia, Lauren had pushed her tiny body through strenuous bouts of intense daily exercise and fed it pitiful meals that every day consisted of less and less. By the time she took centre stage at her landmark birthday party, she weighed the same as the average girl of ten.

What is particularly disturbing about Lauren's story is how quickly and easily a healthy, lively and happy young woman fell into the clutches of a brutal illness that took her to the very edges of survival. For it took just weeks for her to quietly and persistently shed over a quarter of her body weight from her already svelte frame, leaving her dangerously ill.

Even more remarkably, she hid her weight loss from her eight student flatmates and fooled others into thinking she was eating healthily.

"Although I was having three meals a day, they consisted of nothing more than fruit and salad - they had hardly any calories," Lauren explains. "If I went out at the weekend I'd have a meal and a drink but then in the days that followed I'd eat hardly anything to compensate and exercise even harder."

She didn't realise it at the time, but Lauren was heading in the same direction as tragic French model Isabelle Caro, whose pitiful and shocking 4st 8lb frame appeared on anti-anorexia adverts in 2007. The model died in November, aged just 28. Tragically, her grieving mother took her own life a few weeks later.

Thankfully, today Lauren is a healthy size ten for her 5ft 1in frame. She has conquered anorexia and, as Eating Disorder Week looms next week, is using her experience to guide others facing the same ordeal.

She has become an ambassador for eating disorders support organisation Beat, mentoring others who, like her, suddenly find themselves depriving themselves of the very thing that keeps them alive: some in the pursuit of a different body shape, many like Lauren driven by other fears and traumas they don't even understand.

It's estimated that a staggering 1.6 million people in the UK are suffering from some form of eating disorder, whether it's anorexia, where they eat less and less, or binge eating, compulsive overeating or bulimia which causes patients to make themselves vomit after eating. Some resort to even more unusual behaviour like chewing and then spitting out their food or eating non-foods like paper to fill them up.

But while anorexia in particular is often associated with weight-conscious ballet dancers and models, often its roots can be traced to trauma and upset, low self-esteem and turmoil. "I didn't consciously decide to go on a diet," recalls Lauren, whose eating problems developed midway through her second year of studying music at Napier University. "I only found out afterwards that there were a number of things that combined to trigger what happened."

The talented singer had moved to a student flat in Newington from the Innerleithen home she shared with parents Julie and Andrew and younger sister Emma. But she rapidly found living in a busy flat with eight strangers was not for her. "I was unhappy. In the evenings I'd just shut my bedroom door - I was so lonely - and I couldn't wait for the weekends to go home.

"I started to struggle at university, probably because I was so miserable. Then one tutor said I should just give up and that I'd never get anywhere as a singer. Singing was my life. I never wanted to be famous but I always wanted to sing. And suddenly I had to think about all my dreams and what would happen if I couldn't sing."

Then in the space of just three months she was forced to confront the sudden deaths of four people close to her - a high school friend who took her own life, then, to cancer, a teacher who'd mentored her through school, a friend who'd taught her music and her uncle.

As she struggled to cope, Lauren also realised her long-term relationship with her boyfriend was crumbling.

"There were other things too. I'd had a bout of food poisoning that Christmas which made me very aware of what I was eating, plus we'd had a scare with my dad's health so as a family we'd been trying to eat more healthily."

It all created a "perfect storm" in late summer 2008 that led to her placing more and more emphasis on her diet.

"I used to ballet dance and I thought I should get back to feeling fit and healthy," she recalls. "I started to exercise a lot and I'd make food plans, writing down what I was eating and counting calories. At first it felt good and I was oblivious to what damage I might be doing by not replacing the calories I was using up. Then I started to restrict myself, cutting out entire food groups."

Because she was staying in the flat where everyone was preparing their own food, Lauren was able to easily hide exactly what she ate. By the time she returned home for her sister's birthday in October, she was painfully thin. "My mum noticed straight away because I looked so ill. By November I was diagnosed as having anorexia."

But having been diagnosed, Lauren still faced a tortuous six months on the waiting list, hoping to be seen by eating disorder specialists at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital's Cullen Centre.

During that time, her weight continued to drop. A turning point came when she lay in the bath and realised she could feel every bump in her spine. "I have a little cousin, Maia Russell, who's only five and has a chromosome disorder which means she's in and out of hospital all the time," recalls Lauren, 22. "She can't walk or talk but she's the happiest child you could meet. I realised she couldn't help what was happening to her, but I could. It motivated me to get better."

With help from the Cullen Centre she worked through the roots of her illness. And as she fought back to health, she even managed to defy her university tutor and achieve a first class degree and launch a children's youth choir.

Now she wants to use her experience of anorexia to help others. She's even visited the Scottish Parliament to lobby for more cash to deal with eating disorders, arguing that she is proof of how quickly it can grip people of all backgrounds.

"When you think of an eating disorder, you think of models and celebrities," she says. "Why would someone like me with a normal background and a normal life get something like that? I never thought I'd have anorexia. Now I know that it can happen to anyone."

n If you have a problem with an eating disorder, contact Beat, formerly the Eating Disorders Association on 0845 634 1414 (adult line) or 0845 634 7650 (youth line) or visit www.b-eat.co.uk

ILL IN MIND AND BODY

EATING disorders are a form of mental illness which affect hundreds in Scotland every year. Nationwide, it's believed around 1.4 million women and 180,000 men have an eating disorder.

Among the most famous anorexia cases are singer Karen Carpenter who died in 1983 aged 32 from heart failure linked to anorexia, and 21-year-old Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston who suffered from both anorexia and bulimia and weighed just 88lbs when she died

Anorexia typically affects young people between the ages of 12 and 20. However there are increasing signs of women in their 40s being affected. The youngest recorded case of anorexia in Britain is in an eight-year-old girl.

Eating disorder patients in Lothian are treated at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside. A 12-bed specialist unit is due to open at St John's Hospital soon.

Professor Ewan Gillon, Clinical Director of First Psychology Scotland, which treats eating disorder patients, says: "As many as one woman in 20 will have some form of eating distress in their lifetime, which puts into perspective how serious this problem really is."