ALED:Hello, I'm Aled. Welcome to the show. This evening, I want to talk about your mental wellbeing as a teenager. We're all going through something as we grow up. We all cope with it in different ways. Give me a call to share your problems, and let me know how you coped with it, and I can guarantee, that whatever issues you've been through, you'll be helping a lot of people who may be listening to this right now.
ALED:Okay let's go to the phone lines now, and on line one. Hello, what's your name?
LIZZY:Hi, my name's Lizzy.
ALED:Hello Lizzy. What's your story then?
LIZZY:I was just calling in to talk about how I've had anorexia.
ALED:Do you know why it started, or why you felt the need to control your food?
LIZZY:I was about 13, when I started suffering. I had just broken my leg. I gradually put on quite a bit of weight. And then when I went back to school I encountered quite a lot of bullying. It meant that I didn't really have many friends, and I felt really isolated. And so I moved schools, but then I still didn't really fit in. I couldn't control friends. I couldn't control what they said about me or what they thought about me. Controlling what I was eating, was a thing that could replace having friends. It also gave me a way to feel like I was achieving things, and like I had value, and it made me special. It was my best friend, and I believed everything it said. 1
ALED:Did you go to great lengths to try and avoid food, because presumably people around you would start noticing that you weren't eating.
LIZZY:Looking back on it, I'm kind of surprised at how creative I was, and the various things I could do to avoid eating.
LIZZY:If we were sitting at a dinner table, there was ways that I could somehow get the food to the dog or hide it in various items of clothing. As soon as you'd eaten, it was just this horrible feeling of guilt and anger at yourself. I just used to become really panicky of how I can rectify what I've done how can I change it, how can I make sure I don't eat anything else that day to counteract it, or do however much exercise I felt I needed to do. There were times when I really wanted to eat, and I'd see a piece of chocolate cake and actually I thought I would really like that. But then it's like Lizzy, don't be so stupid, why would you, why would you think you deserve that? If there's a physical illness, you can start healing it, but no one can get inside your head, and take the voice away or hear what's going on to fix it.
ALED:A lot of the media likes to jump on size zero models or the pressures on people to try and look skinny, but it wasn't really about losing weight and being skinny for you was it?
LIZZY:I don't think I ever really saw myself as skinny. I don't know whether that's because, if I had have let myself seen it then I would have thought I had to change. I became really secretive, really manipulative, really aggressive, and angry, and controlling. And looking back on it, there are things that I'd do that I'm still horrified that I did. Like holding scissors to my dad's stomach, over a chocolate biscuit. I don't think I've ever seen my dad so scared. I would never do that, but it just completely changed me as a person.
ALED:So how bad did things get?
LIZZY:Yeah I hadn't eaten for quite a few days, and I just had this excruciating agony in my stomach. I needed to go straight to the hospital. I was put on permanent bed rest, so I wasn't even allowed to get out of the bed, because my heart was in such a weak condition that if I moved, it would just put too much strain on it. And I could die. I think however close death can feel, you still feel invincible. I would end up water-loading, which became quite a big thing for me, where I would just drink so much before I was weighed, so that it was all made up with water. Things went from bad to worse from then, and I ended up in a long stay in-patient hospital.
LIZZY:I had to be supervised when I ate, and after I ate. I had my window screwed shut and my plug blocked in my sink so that I couldn't throw up and not let anyone see, and I had to be watched 24 hours a day. There were ways that I could secretly exercise in my room. If I wasn't being watched, I would just be doing star jumps continually through the day. I would do absolutely anything to try and burn off energy. But, I couldn't stop what was going on inside my head.
ALED:If you were able to go through having doctors and nurses being so forceful with you and you still not quite hearing it inside you, what did it take for you to start to… How do you turn yourself around from that?
LIZZY:I think it was the risk of infertility that really got me. Where I hadn't had a period in about four years, I think I realised just how real that was, that actually I could be putting so much at risk. Being able to have children is such a huge thing that I just didn't want to lose that.
LIZZY:I ended up going into a psychiatric in-patient unit, for about six or seven months, which I think gave me a lot of therapy which was very helpful, in that it got me eating again and got me in the habit of eating in the routine. But then all recovery isn't you know, just really, really happy, it's actually horrible, and you've just got to keep your, keep your end goal in sight, and realise that it's not going to be happy for a while, because you're still challenging yourself, but at the end of the day what you're working towards is… Is going to be a lot better. Now I feel really sad about how it's changed our family life, of what it could have been, to the years we lost, and to what it's like now. But then I see the positives of what happened, like the fact that I've had that life experience and it means that I can help other people.
ALED:Well Lizzy, thank you so much for your call today. I've certainly learnt a lot from what your story was, and I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this who might be going through the same thing that have a better understanding of what you went through or what maybe they should do to get to a better place. So thank you very much for the call, Lizzy.
LIZZY:That's okay. Thanks, bye.
A teenage girl called Lizzie is interviewed by BBC radio presenter Aled Haydn Jones.
She describes her experiences of anorexia and how she overcame it.
The radio show is fictional but the caller and her experiences are real.
Due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, teacher viewing is recommended before watching with your students.
This clip is from the series Coping.
Teacher Notes
Students could produce a spider diagram, detailing the qualities of an emotionally healthy person who is in control of their thoughts.
Students could then research anorexia to find out what the signs are and produce an information leaflet offering practical advice and guidance for sufferers and their families.
Curriculum Notes
This clip is relevant for teaching Modern Studies and PSHE and Citizenship, in particular for Healthy Lifestyles and Mental and Emotional Health, at GCSE and National 4/5 level (Scotland).
