When I think about mealtimes at school, a part of me still recoils. Talking about how little you’d eaten was a badge of honour. Rushing downstairs to the bathroom after meals? A bonding experience. Girls walking into the dining hall with barely anything on their trays? A sign of social supremacy. It was awful – and yet it all seemed so normal.
According to the charity Beat, roughly 1.25 million people in the UK have an eating disorder. The majority are female and many develop them during adolescence. This was certainly the case among my peers at school, with disordered eating habits starting at around age 14. It didn’t help that we were weighed on a fortnightly basis – a measure that had originally been introduced to monitor eating disorders but only ended up perpetuating them.
