My baby joy, by BBC presenter who weighed 4½ stone in grip of anorexia

A BBC Scotland television reporter who was given two weeks to live when she suffered from anorexia in her twenties has become a mother for the first time.

Sports reporter Heather Dewar, 35, weighed just four-and-a-half stone at the depth of her condition. She starved herself so savagely she was a walking skeleton warned by doctors she was days from death.

The illness has left her with the bones of a 71-year-old woman but despite her damaged body she has had her first daughter, Saskia.

Ms Dewar said: "To put it simply, what I did destroyed my body. It put so much strain on it, it was starting to shut down, starting to eat itself.

"Having done that to myself, I feel very grateful for the fact I can still have a child. There was a time I could never have thought that was possible, to have a pregnancy bump, to be eating, to be breastfeeding. She's a little bit of a miracle to me."

Heather's eating disorder did not start out as anything to do with her weight.

A steady size eight to ten, she was starting her French and history degree at Edinburgh University when she began feeling the pressure to do well.

Trying hard to control her life and not always able to, eating was the one thing she could control. She started obsessively regulating what she put into her body.

Spending her fourth year in Paris, living alone with no-one to notice, the problem got worse.

Heather ate just a small piece of fruit most days and the 5ft 4in tall student shrank to five stones.

She said: "I was terrified of food, even to take a sip of soup. But at the same time I was obsessed with it. I could spend hours staring at my favourite food in the supermarket but I wasn't allowed to touch it and I wasn't allowed to buy it.

"I started to change, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even lift my head from the pillow, I found it difficult to walk.

"When I was in the bath I had to put my hands under myself because my bones were sticking out and it was painful.

"I had this skeletal face, I looked like an old woman - it was horrible but I couldn't see it."

When her mother visited her in France she was horrified and took her back to the UK. After a long struggle, she beat the illness, but believed the remaining bone problems, particularly around her pelvis, would mean she could never conceive.

However, in August 2009, she found out she was expecting. Heather and partner Darren Anderson, 37, were delighted.

She said: "Anorexia is in some ways such a selfish thing, it's all about you, how you look, what you're putting into your body.

"When you are pregnant and when you have a child it's not about you any more. I feel this great sense of responsibility to Saskia."