Story

Anorexia: 'Food is the enemy to be conquered’.

How Harriet Davies and her mother fought the deadly grip of anorexia, the same eating disorder that killed medical student Sarah Houston last year.

'I would compare myself unfavourably to models and celebrities in magazines. Now I know that those photos are retouched – those bodies aren’t real. But then I didn’t realise that,' says Harriet Davies.

 "I can understand why someone suffering an eating disorder would buy pills over the internet to help them lose weight,” says Harriet Davies. “When you’re in the grip of anorexia or bulimia, you can’t think straight. You might know the dangers, but you will take the risk anyway because controlling your body overrides everything.”

Last week, an inquest heard that Sarah Houston, a 23-year-old medical student, had collapsed and died in September last year after taking the banned slimming pill DNP, which she had bought online. Sarah had been struggling with bulimia for several years and was seeing a psychiatrist to help her overcome the condition.

Harriet is 21 and a medical student, too. Bright and bubbly, she is enjoying student life at Lancaster University, where she is studying to be a doctor. Yet just five years ago, she was so ill she was hospitalised for seven months in a specialist eating disorders unit, and at times fed by a nasal gastric tube. Both her 16th and 17th birthdays were spent on a hospital ward.

Originally from Lisburn in Northern Ireland, Harriet developed anorexia at 15. Initially, she had decided to lose a bit of weight for a family beach holiday. “I lost a few pounds, felt good and confident about myself, so I decided to lose more and couldn’t stop,” she recalls.

The illness took hold so quickly that within three months, her frantic mother Elaine, 55, was seeking help from her GP. Elaine watched in despair as her outgoing and sociable child became withdrawn, calorie-obsessed and dangerously skeletal.

“People with eating disorders are very vulnerable,” says Elaine. “The illness controls them, and they stop making rational decisions.”

Harriet agrees. “I would compare myself unfavourably to models and celebrities in magazines. Now I know that those photos are retouched – those bodies aren’t real. But then I didn’t realise that.”

The death of her grandmother may have also contributed to her anorexia. “That was my first real bereavement. I wonder now if obsessive dieting was my way of trying to regain some control in a world that had suddenly become unstable.”

Six months after starting her “diet”, Harriet spent six weeks in her local hospital in Lisburn, where she was fed with a nasal gastric tube.

When she returned home, she simply refused to eat.

“I was completely in the grip of anorexia,” says Harriet, who despaired that she would never be well again. “The illness is a complex mental health condition. It isn’t simply wanting to be slim. It’s more complicated than that. It’s about control, perfectionism and a desire to conquer food, which is the enemy.”

Like most people with an eating disorder, Harriet had become adept at making food disappear. “She was like a magician and I had to be a detective. Food would just vanish from her plate or the pot on the stove,” Elaine recalls.

Harriet explains that she would hide it – in her pockets or around the kitchen – and get rid of it later. “I was fascinated by food and spent hours watching cookery programmes like MasterChef, but the thought of eating it repelled me.”

After being hospitalised for a second time in Lisburn, again on a general ward for six weeks, Harriet was moved at 16 to the specialist eating disorders unit at St George’s Hospital in London. The unit specialises in treating young people with severe eating disorders, offering psychological as well as medical support.

When Harriet was hospitalised in London, her mother and father, John, 61 a professor of agri-food economics, visited every weekend with their son Jonathan, who was a student at King’s College London.

Harriet credits her mother with her recovery. “She was there with me every step of the way,” she says quietly.

Being there for Harriet meant that Elaine took a three-year career break from her job as a senior library assistant at Queens University in Belfast. It would have been impossible to work and look after Harriet as well, she says.

“I am thankful that Harriet was an adolescent when she became ill. Because she was still at home I was able to monitor her appointments at the hospital and oversee every single meal she ate.”

Overseeing her daughter’s meals at home meant standing with Harriet while food was weighed and cooked, and then sitting with her while she ate.

“I had to be extremely patient. I would eat with Harriet, and not allow her to leave the table until she, too, had eaten her meal. I would just repeat that it was all right to eat, that she would be fine, that she needed to eat this food,” Elaine says.

“It was vital that food was eaten quietly and calmly. We never rushed a meal or ate on the hoof. Food had to be planned with utter precision to make Harriet feel safe.”

Elaine was helped to manage her daughter’s anorexia by staff at St George’s specialist eating disorders unit.

“I was taught how to draw up an eating plan. I weighed out precise quantities in front of Harriet and never deviated from the plan. That was very important. She had to trust me completely.”

At her lowest ebb, Harriet was so ill she preferred not to leave the house. She lost, her mother says, most of her teenage years to anorexia. She didn’t go to school for 16 months but studied at home, still managing to pass five GCSEs. She repeated a year at A-level and did a year-long foundation medical course before commencing her degree. Her mother believes that it was this steely determination to be a doctor that in part contributed to Harriet’s recovery.

During the years she suffered with anorexia, Harriet’s world shrank. She remained at home, rarely venturing out with friends.

“At my worst, I could hardly walk and when I did my chest hurt,” Harriet says. She lost over 44 pounds, and her clothes hung from her emaciated frame. She looked, and felt, extremely ill.

Though she wanted to get better, there were times when Harriet doubted she ever would. Her mother, however, never gave up hope. “I knew I couldn’t despair because Harriet got her hope from me and from her family. If we gave up hope, she would have been lost,” Elaine says.

Elaine believes her daughter needed constant reassurance that it was all right to eat and that taking pleasure from food was natural and permissible. “I would often sit and eat a scone with my coffee. I’d see Harriet watching me and tell her that eating a little treat was fine.”

Harriet believes that her mother’s healthy relationship with food and comfort with her own body also helped.

She has been slowly recovering since being discharged from St George’s in July 2009. She still has support from a therapist, the eating disorder charity Beat, and from a hospital out-patient team. Continued support, she says, is vital to her recovery.

“I wouldn’t say that I am cured, but I’m getting there. My relationship with food is healthier. I can go out for a meal in a restaurant and feel relaxed, even though I don’t know the precise calorific value of every item on the menu. That just wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.”

It is crucial, she believes, that help is sought early. “Don’t think that you can deal with this alone, because you can’t. Specialist intervention is necessary because the person with an eating disorder needs to change their thought processes.

“Eating disorders need to be addressed before they have a chance to establish themselves in a person’s head. Once ideas are lodged, it’s hard to dislodge them.”

Therapy has taught her coping strategies. “I still have some negative thoughts about myself and my body, but I have ways of dealing with those thoughts now.”

Friends, too, have been a huge source of comfort. “You just get through one day at a time,” says Elaine. “For several years our whole focus was on making Harriet better. Nothing else really mattered. That was what I was doing – making Harriet well.”

Now that she is recovering, Harriet has rediscovered her old passions. She plays the piano, makes jewellery and has a wide circle of friends. She doesn’t have a particular boyfriend, but is very happy enjoying student life. Elaine gets huge pleasure from Harriet’s progress.

“I am immensely proud of my daughter. I look at what she has gone through and what she has achieved and I am just profoundly grateful to all the people who have helped us. I feel that I have got back my beautiful, clever, witty life-loving girl from a disease that nearly took her from us.”