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The reasons I became anorexic are probably quite simple. I was 14 and I suddenly began looking at myself and I wanted to be skinny. It was simply to become skinny; I just ate less every day and kept my motives to myself. It was luck that my teachers noticed, that my mom eventually admitted that they were right, and that the NHS doctors bullied me into eating more. The problem was that I had begun to identify food with control and success, and I began coping with the stress by exerting this control over myself once again. I no longer had the stubbornness and willpower to be anorexic, but bulimia seemed easy and relatively painless until it began to take control over me. It began to characterise my thoughts and guide my actions. I became more impulsive and self-deprecating, everything was a trigger, and everything was a cure. But again I was lucky, since I sensed that things didn't have to be this way – maybe I didn’t have to fight with this my whole life – at the age of 19 I tried talking about it for the first time. I struggled, with some small success, without professional help for a year or so before coming to Oxford and deciding to take advantage of the free counselling service (couldn’t hurt, I thought). The best thing to come of it was the recommendation to take part in a Cognitive Behaviour Therapy study at the Warneford … it was basically a one-on-one training course for how to eat healthily/‘normally’, mixed with some basic guidance on how not to directly associate food with happiness or confidence, nor with hatred or hopelessness. The course began intensively and tapered out over 6 months, and was in many ways my saving grace, although it did the hateful thing of making me eat more and what I want (not, however, eating everything that could fit into my poor stomach). I continue struggling with it even now, but I guess recovery is always a slow process when it sticks. I have the  useful ‘therapist’s rhetoric’ to tackle the problems when they happen, and I know how to talk about the things which make me feel out of control (and I now have a sense for people who can listen!) A good recovery I think involves seeing where you’ve been, anticipating where you’re going and how you might get there, and setting up the support network that sees you through all the eventualities.