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Chapter One – Running Free
Where Did It Go Wrong?
Organ failure. Resuscitation Unit. Death. What causes someone to starve themselves to the brink of death? To starve themselves to the point where they can’t walk, can hardly talk, and where their heart is barely beating to keep them alive? The answer? Anorexia.
I was twenty-two years old and had been rushed to A & E and the Resuscitation Unit. My organs were failing and I had hypothermia. I was told I faced imminent death. As each minute passed, it was doubtful if I would live to see the next. I was hooked up to every machine and every drip possible. Doctors and nurses were working their hardest to keep me alive. My parents stood helpless by my bedside, ghostly pale as they watched their daughter dying in front of their eyes.
My heart rate was averaging less than twenty beats per minute and I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The nurses wrapped my body in heated blankets.
“You have severe hypothermia,” a nurse said. “Your body temperature is critically low and your whole body is shutting down. We need to raise your temperature immediately or your heart is going to stop.”
That was the reality – I was being told I was in organ failure and could die any minute. But the reality in my mind? I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything other than my weight. I was about to die, but I was so happy that I had reached a new all-time lowest weight.
This wasn’t the first time I had been in this state. My organs had nearly failed and I had nearly died several times over the previous two years. This was now my third admission.
Three years before, I was a nineteen-year-old athlete ranked in the Top 30 in the UK for my age, aspiring to run for Great Britain as a professional. How did it all go so terribly wrong? How had my one lifetime dream of becoming a professional athlete turned into the living nightmare of anorexia?
The Beginning
I had always been sporty, stubborn, and determined – characteristics that all help to fuel anorexia. But I wasn’t born with an irrational fear of weight gain, an intense desire to lose weight, an obsession with calories and exercise, and rock bottom self-esteem. These developed sometime over my childhood and adolescence. There was a time when it wasn’t like that. There was a time when I was happy and free.
My childhood was the best I could have wished for. I always felt loved, I always had fun, and I was happy. I had two loving parents, a fun older sister, Nicola, who I got on with (most of the time), and wonderful grandparents who I saw regularly. I also had a nanny, Jenny, who looked after me when my parents went to work and, once I had started school, when school finished until my parents got home. Jenny was great and we had lots of fun. She always gave me so much love. It was like having a second mum. I was lucky to have this loving and extended family, including Jenny, as I was growing up.
When I wasn’t at school, you could find me playing outside with the other kids that lived down my road. We always had a great time, making up dance routines, riding our bikes, playing football, board games, going to the park – you name it, we did it. There was never a moment that wasn’t filled with fun. From the age of five, I was playing out in the street virtually every weekend. The weekends were also special because my mum and dad would take us into town and we would go to Debenhams for cake. I always had a sticky bun and Nicola had a Belgian bun.
On a Sunday, I would spend my £1 pocket money on a pack of Spice Girls photos to glue into my Spice Girls scrap book. If we were really lucky, we were allowed to go round to the corner shop and get a bag of penny sweets. Food at that age was fun. We generally ate healthily but were allowed treats like this. We always ate together as a family and meal times were enjoyable occasions. It wasn’t until later that this started to change.
When I was seven, my nanny Jenny became pregnant with her first child. When Jenny’s daughter, Laura, was born, it was like having a younger sister. Every afternoon when Jenny picked me up from school, I couldn’t wait to go back to their house and play games, play with dolls and just have more fun. I absolutely loved being a child and I never wanted to go grow up.
From a very young age, I was a fiery, determined and stubborn character. My dad used to call me ‘fierce Bex’ because my determination and stubbornness could make me hot-headed. When I was about three, and my dad was trying to teach me how to ride a bike, I got so angry with him when he let go of my saddle and I fell off. Then there was the time – I was still about three years old – when I hit my sister over the head with a brick because she hadn’t let me join in her game.
My mum always says that once I set my mind to something that is it, I do it. It was clear that my strong mind and determination were there from a young age. I channelled a lot of this determination into sport.
My passion for playing sport really grew during junior school. In Year 4, I started playing netball and I absolutely loved it. I played Centre because you get to run around the most – I loved running. I seemed to have a natural ability to run fast. Every sports day in primary school, I would enter the sprint race. Then I went on to the District Sports where I raced against girls from all the other local primary schools. And I always won those races. My mum, seeing that I had potential, encouraged me to join the local athletics club, which I did with my friends in the summer holidays after Year 6. But when we started secondary school and were all in different classes, we stopped going to the athletics club together. My mum encouraged me to keep going, which I did every now and again, but I hated going on my own.
I found the transition from primary to secondary school very hard. I went from being popular with lots of friends in primary school to virtually being an outcast in secondary school. In Year 7, I lost touch with all my old friends and I struggled to find a group of girls that I could call my friends. Break and lunch times were spent on the edge of a group of girls that I really wanted to be friends with. But I would stand there, on the edge of the circle, not uttering a word. Just listening to their conversations and feeling completely lonely.
“Why don’t you speak?” Tina said.
She was the most popular girl in the year, and she was best friends with girl I wanted to be best friends with. I just shrugged my shoulders. I was too scared to speak. I didn’t have the confidence and, deep down, I knew they didn’t like me. I was a tag-along and someone they would rather be without.
But, in Years 8 and 9, I formed a new friendship group. It comprised a girl who lived down my road, Vicky, and her best friend, and another girl, Jess, who I had become good friends with through our Maths lessons. I felt like I fitted in and we always had fun. It was great because we also met up sometimes on weekends and, if we didn’t make plans, Vicky and I would simply play out in the street. There was, however, an unspoken acknowledgement that Vicky and her friend from primary school were best friends, and me and Jess were best friends.
In Year 8, I started going to the athletics club regularly with Vicky. Vicky and her sister Mia had moved to my road when we were all about nine years old and they instantly joined the group of us playing outside together all the time. As we got a bit older, the numbers of us playing out in the street started to dwindle but Vicky, Mia, and I always continued. We had sleep overs, went to pop concerts, did everything and anything together. One of our favourites was the board game ‘The Game of Life.’ We would spend hours playing this, going backwards and forwards, trying to get the best house, the best job, and as many children as we could – for whom we meticulously planned names. For years I planned on calling my first daughter Britney, after my obsession with Britney Spears! Vicky and I were in a lot of the same lessons at school and, because we were always playing out together, it made sense for us to go to the athletics club together.
Every Tuesday and Thursday night, aged around thirteen, we went to the athletics club together where we would run and train in the young sprints group. Every sports day at secondary school, I raced in the 100 metres (m). I always won the race, then set a school record and went on to win the District Sports A race. I was the fastest girl from all the local secondary schools. This was a routine that occurred every year. In the summer, I would sometimes compete for the athletics club at weekends in the sprint races and high jump for my age group. I always did quite well. When I kept doing well and kept running quick times, it made me stop and think that actually I might be quite good at running. But it was around this time that I also became very conscious of my size and weight.
My periods started when I was thirteen and I was absolutely devastated. I cried for hours that evening. I couldn’t bear the changes my body was going through. I hated having a period, I hated my body becoming like an adult, I hated that I was losing my childhood. It was with my periods starting that I became concerned with my size. In reality, my body shape and size were perfectly normal, but I felt fat and a lot bigger than other people. More importantly though, I started to think my athletic performance would improve if I lost some weight. My athletics was going well and I really enjoyed it. I dreamt about becoming a professional athlete. That was the career I wanted to pursue. Sometimes during half-term when I would go to Jenny’s for the day, on my ten-minute walk to her house, I would imagine myself being interviewed on the radio – Rebecca, the Great British athlete and the story of my rise to success. It was my dream and I was determined to achieve it.
To do this, I knew I needed to train properly and I was convinced I needed to lose weight. In Year 9, aged fourteen, I rarely missed a training session. Vicky had stopped coming by this stage. On top of athletics, I was doing netball training once a week, with a match on a Saturday. I was also in the school netball, basketball, swimming, athletics, and rounders teams, which all involved regular training and fixtures. Every bit of training I did was good because it helped me feel like I was working towards my dream. I cut back a bit on what I was eating, in an attempt to lose weight to help me run faster. Not much: only the odd spoonful of Coco Pops at breakfast or chocolate after dinner in the evening.
With the large amount of exercise I was doing, coupled with my slight energy restriction, my periods stopped. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Little did I know, this was probably one of the first signs that anorexia was starting to lay its foundations. At the time, I saw it only as a positive thing. Without periods, I might be able to stop my body changing into an adult and I thought that must be a good thing for my running. I knew it must mean I had lost a bit of weight, but I imagined there would be loads of professional athletes who didn’t have periods.
When it was clear that my periods had definitely stopped and it wasn’t simply a case of them being irregular, my mum took me to the doctor, worried that something could be wrong. The doctor dismissed her concerns and explained that many athletes do not have periods. With the amount of exercise I was doing, the doctor said not having periods was common and nothing for me to worry about. So then, in my mind, not having periods was not only a good thing because of the inhibition of adulthood, it was an absolute must for the achievement of becoming a professional athlete. I had to keep my periods away and I had to lose some more weight. I was convinced this was the only way to get faster.
With my determination to become a professional athlete growing stronger, in November 2003, aged fifteen, I plucked up the courage to ask the elite sprints coach if I could join his group. He welcomed me and I hoped this would be the start of the dedicated training I needed to fulfil my dream. The amount of training I was doing increased significantly. I went from doing the fun sessions twice a week to having sessions on a Tuesday and Thursday, along with weight training on a Sunday and often another running session on a Saturday.
There were some really quick sprinters in the group, and I wanted to be as fast as them. With my growing desire to get faster, so my desire to lose weight grew. The fastest girls in the group were all very slight, so the answer seemed logical to me: to become as fast as them, I needed to get as slim as them.
Monday 12th Jan 2004
I’m trying to lose weight because everyone at athletics is skinny and I’m fat. I want a flat stomach like the other girls in the group. I really hope I do get to be an athlete when I’m older because you only get one life and that’s what I want to do in it. If I get to go to Loughborough Uni then I’ll be happy. I’ve just done 35 sit-ups, 25 triceps dips and 100 leg raises – hopefully take some calories off me! The only meal I can cut down on is lunch because all the others my mum is there, but I feel guilty wasting food. My eyes are bigger than my belly.
Anorexia was starting to lay its roots in my mind. I didn’t realise it then but, looking back, I can see my behaviours were characteristic of someone with anorexia. Though my desire to lose weight and get thinner was triggered by my desire to get faster at running, at the same time as I made the move to the elite running group, I was also becoming increasingly unhappy at school, making me more and more vulnerable to the clutches of anorexia.
At the start of Year 10, Jess found a new best friend and left our foursome to join another group. This was really hard to deal with. It confirmed my feelings that I was a completely boring and unlikeable person. I wasn’t fun, outgoing, chatty or bubbly, so no one was ever going to want to be my best friend.
Sunday 25th January 2004,
I slept round Jess’s on Friday with Chloe. They’ve done a friendship box and in it Jess wrote a letter to Chloe saying ‘you’re my best mate’. It made me sad. I wonder if I’ll still be friends with Jess, Vicky, and Louise when I’m eighteen? One thing’s for sure – we won’t be a four anymore. I wish we could go back and be like that again. It’s really weird thinking about the future because I have no idea what’s going to happen. I just want Chloe and Jess to break up. I know it sounds horrible and it will probably be me and Jess that break up. I’m depressed now. Why does Jess have to be friends with Chloe? I will just have to be my own best friend.
So, at the same time my training was increasing, my friendships and my self-esteem were crumbling. I felt so lost and alone. But the one thing I was certain of – I had to lose weight. Jess had the perfect figure and the girls at running had perfect figures. They were all popular and I was a reject. Losing weight seemed to not only be the answer to getting faster at running, but also to becoming more likeable and popular. Anorexia preyed on my loneliness. I didn’t have a best friend and anorexia was slowly working its poison. Little did I know that ‘just having to be my own best friend’ was actually anorexia starting to form the deadliest friendship with my vulnerable mind.
I began to record what I was eating. That way, I could objectively see what I might take out in order to help me lose weight.
17th May 2004,
Breakfast: Coco Pops and a toasted muffin
Lunch: One and a half tuna rolls, cucumber and carrot sticks, an apple and a Brunch bar
Dinner: Pasta and veg, Chocolate cheesecake, three Rolo chocolates.
What can I cut out? I don’t have any discipline. I’ll try and leave some Coco Pops, leave a chunk of apple and not eat chocolate after dinner.
And so the slippery slope began. Cutting out and hiding food. I started giving or throwing away part of my lunch at school, and I would hide cereal in my dressing gown at breakfast. I was competing in events such as The South Of England’s, where I was ranked 13th, and this provided me with some hope that one day, my dream would come true. Losing weight seemed to be the answer to all my problems. In reality, my body was now actually slightly underweight though pretty athletic. But this was not the reflection I saw in the mirror. I not only hated my body – its fatness and the way it looked – but also my whole being. I hated me. Focusing on losing weight and trying to get thinner not only helped me work towards my dream, but it also, subconsciously, eased the pain and loneliness I was feeling.
Running Free: My Battle With Anorexia
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