I found a photo recently that stopped me in my tracks. There I was at age 12, smiling at the camera during what would be my last summer with a normal relationship with food. Looking at that image now, I can see a girl laughing wholeheartedly - the girl in the photo had no idea what an eating disorder was. Not long after this photo her life changed and she lost her freedom - a freedom that she wouldn't experience again for over three decades.
The following summer, everything changed. I returned from visiting family in Warsaw – a few years before we'd just moved from Poland to Sweden – feeling different about my body. The combination of puberty and summer eating left me feeling a bit chubby, you know? That's when my eating disorder began its long, messy journey through my life. What started as not eating much and running obsessively at age 12 led to weeks in the hospital, then turned into full-blown bulimia by 15. I think it's fair to say that eating disorders became this invisible companion that shaped my relationship with food, my body, and ultimately, my life's work for the next 30 years.
Today, as a BANT-registered nutritional therapist, I support others going through similar struggles. But honestly, my path to what I do today wasn't straightforward at all – it was carved through lived experience, countless setbacks, and the slow, patient work of rewiring not just my eating patterns, but my entire relationship with my habits, my pattern, my brain (!!!) , nourishment and self-care.
I was born in 1975, which means I developed my eating disorder during a time when these conditions were barely talked about. To give you an idea of how unknown eating disorders were back then – there's this researcher, Christopher Fairburn, who'd put an ad in British Vogue in the 1970s. He wasn't expecting much response, but he got thousands of letters from women going through the same binge-purge cycles he was studying. Bulimia had literally just been identified as a real condition.
When I came back from that summer in Warsaw, I felt what probably a lot of teenage girls feel – my body was changing, I'd put on some weight, and I just felt uncomfortable in my own skin. But what started as typical teenage insecurity quickly spiraled into something much more serious. I began running obsessively and at the same time, I pretty much stopped eating. The weight came off fast.
Soon, my anorexia became hard to ignore. I was 170 cm tall and weighed just 36 kilos. I didn't know it at the time, but my body was shutting down. My brain function was severely compromised, and I was experiencing the kind of physical deterioration that comes with profound malnutrition. I eventually ended up in the hospital. Looking back at this time, today I know that my brain was going through atrophy of the same kind as in Alzheimers. I have hardly any memory from this time period.
Even the medical professionals were puzzled by what was happening to me. They ran tests for cancer and other diseases before anyone even considered anorexia. I was probably one of the first students at my school to show symptoms of an eating disorder. That's how unrecognized these conditions were back then.
My main teacher, who had actually recovered from anorexia herself, was the one who finally helped my mother understand what was going on. Eventually, the school and doctors realized I needed serious help.
The hospitalization was long and, looking back, pretty traumatic in ways that would shape my relationship with food for decades. I was admitted in critical condition, and the medical approach back then was so different from what we understand about eating disorder treatment today.
During the day, they fed me high-calorie foods - ice cream, cakes, bread, sugary stuff - while watching me constantly to make sure I ate. The staff thought getting as many calories into me as possible was the main goal. But they didn't understand the psychological impact of this approach, or that my malnourished body couldn't properly handle this sudden flood of high-sugar, high-fat foods.
The worst part was being left alone at night. Because I was so physically weak, they told me to stay still during the day. But at night, with no one watching, I'd exercise compulsively for hours. I have vivid memories of those nights – alone in the hospital, my family not there, desperately trying to burn off the calories I'd been forced to eat. At least, this is how I remember it.
Here's the cruel irony: despite eating during the day, I kept losing weight. This is actually common with severe anorexia – your body is so depleted that it absorbs every bit of energy it can get. Combined with my nighttime exercise, I was actually getting worse while supposedly being treated.
Eventually, they moved me to a psychiatric ward where I could be watched alongside my mother and brother. The constant surveillance, losing any privacy or control, feeling watched all the time – it was during this period that I discovered I could throw up. At first, it felt like I'd found this brilliant solution, not knowing that it was called “bulimia”. I thought I could eat to keep the medical staff happy, then quietly purge without anyone knowing.
What I didn't see coming was how quickly this “solution” would spiral completely out of control. That rigid control I'd felt during my anorexic phase – that sense of being in command of my body and eating – just vanished overnight. When you're severely malnourished and you start eating again, your body craves everything. The biological drive to eat is overwhelming because your system genuinely needs massive amounts of nutrition to start healing.
But mentally, I just couldn't handle having all that food in my body. The guilt, the physical discomfort, the terror of gaining weight – it was unbearable. And from a digestive perspective, my system was so messed up that it couldn't process the food properly anyway. Everything felt wrong, chaotic, completely out of control.
This is when my eating disorder really became a daily battle that would consume the next 30 years of my life. The switch from anorexia to bulimia marked the beginning of a different kind of hell. Not the euphoric control of restriction, but the devastating cycle of binge eating and purging that I couldn't stop no matter how desperately I wanted to.
For the next three decades, I became an expert at hiding. Moving away from Sweden at 20 meant my family didn't see my daily struggles. I learned to function, to work, to keep relationships going – all while managing this constant mental space taken up by planning when and where to eat, when and where to purge.
The eating disorder became like a second identity. It was me and the bulimia, working as a team. I never really saw it as this huge problem because I'd gotten so used to it. It was just part of who I was, like this entity that belonged to my personality.
Even during my years working at Purple Valley, this yoga retreat center where I was supposed to represent health and wellness, I was privately dealing with dysfunctional eating behaviors. The irony wasn't lost on me, but it also showed me something important: eating disorders don't care what you do for work, and they definitely don't skip over people who seem to have their lives together.
The shame around eating disorders is intense. I discovered it's actually easier to tell someone you've struggled with drugs than to admit to decades of bulimia. There's something about disordered eating that carries this particular kind of judgment, both from other people and from ourselves.
The real turning point came in 2018, when I was 42. My family came to visit me in India, and during that visit, I had this profound realization about what I actually wanted for my life. It was the same year I met my partner, and something about this convergence of events – family, love, possibility – made me recognize how desperately I wanted freedom from this dysfunctional eating.
What really changed everything was when a person close to me developed severe anorexia. Watching someone I loved fall into the same patterns that had controlled my life for three decades was devastating. But it was also the wake-up call I needed. I thought, if this person can find healing, and if I can help support that healing, then maybe recovery is possible for me too.
This experience forced me to face a truth I'd been avoiding: I didn't want to spend the rest of my life controlled by eating disorder behaviors. I didn't want to keep hiding, managing symptoms, living half a life. I didn't want to just stand by and watch others suffer from something I understood so deeply without trying to help. Most importantly, I wanted to live a life in honesty - radical honesty.
Around the same time, I found this research leaflet in my partner's house about genetic factors in eating disorders. The researcher featured had recovered from a 30-year eating disorder, and reading her story gave me something I'd never felt before: hope. If she could do it after three decades, maybe I could too. Maybe I wasn't alone in thinking freedom was possible.
When I started studying nutrition, I honestly never planned to work with eating disorders and dysfunctional eating. I actually avoided the idea because I was scared it might trigger my own recovery process. But my close friend's illness completely changed my perspective. I realized that my decades of struggle, while painful, had given me something valuable: real understanding of what it means to live with dysfunctional eating.
My nutrition studies showed me how little I actually knew about feeding my body properly, even though I thought I was pretty knowledgeable in my 20s and 30s. The field of nutrition is huge and constantly changing, and I discovered that what I thought I knew about food and health was often incomplete or just outdated.
Each new area of study brought these breakthrough moments. Learning about how nutrients relate to mental health, digestive function, and eating behaviors opened up completely new possibilities for supporting recovery. I started understanding how malnutrition messes with brain function, how certain nutrients support neurotransmitter production, and how digestive health and hormones impacts everything from mood to food cravings.
The academic challenges were real – especially the writing requirements, since my language had gotten mixed up from years of living in different countries. But the biggest challenge was narrowing down my focus. Nutrition is so vast that you can't possibly know everything, so I had to figure out which direction I really wanted to go with my knowledge.
My formal training with the National Centre for Eating Disorders was particularly eye-opening. During my studies there, my main tutor shared this sobering statistic: for people who've lived with bulimia for 20, 30, or 40 years, the chances of complete recovery are very small. This wasn't surprising to me – I'd experienced firsthand how deeply these patterns get ingrained.
But instead of discouraging me, this information helped me develop a more realistic and compassionate approach to recovery. I learned that even if complete recovery feels impossible, significant improvement in quality of life absolutely is possible. Recovery doesn't have to be perfect to be meaningful. Small, consistent steps forward can completely transform your relationship with food and with yourself. Small, consistent steps forward, help us to change our habits.
The training helped me understand that recovery is basically about rewiring your brain, creating new neural pathways, finding different ways of handling not just food, but stress, emotions, and self-care. It's like learning a completely new language after speaking only one for decades. In one way I knew this already, as what was taught at the training I had already been applying to my own behaviours. I was my own experiment.
Today, my approach to nutritional therapy is deeply shaped by both my personal journey and my professional training. I've learned that eating disorders exist on a spectrum, and they're way more common than we talk about openly. Almost every client I work with – even those who come for general nutrition guidance – ends up revealing some form of disordered eating patterns once we start working together.
What makes my practice different is this integration of lived experience with evidence-based knowledge. I understand in my bones what it feels like to be consumed by food thoughts, to live with constant food noise, to plan your entire day around eating and purging, to feel completely out of control while looking totally functional from the outside. This understanding lets me meet clients where they are without judgment and offer hope based on real experience, not just textbook knowledge.
My background in yoga and holistic practices shapes every aspect of my work. I've seen how connected the mind, body, and spirit really are, and how addressing just one piece of dysfunctional eating often isn't enough. When someone has an eating disorder, there's often this inability to be present with themselves – the disordered eating patterns are masking other emotional or psychological needs.
Yoga has taught me that healing happens on multiple levels at the same time. The meditative parts of practice help you develop the ability to sit with discomfort without immediately reaching for food behaviors as coping mechanisms. The physical practice can help rebuild a positive relationship with your body's strength and what it can do, rather than focusing only on appearance.
But I've also learned to watch for when yoga practice itself becomes obsessive. The same personality traits that can lead to eating disorders – perfectionism, control, all-or-nothing thinking – can easily transfer to spiritual or fitness practices. This is why I really emphasize finding moderation and balance in all areas of life.
In my nutritional work, I focus on understanding the whole person – their history, their triggers, their relationship with their body, their stress patterns, sleep, digestive health. Eating disorders are complex conditions that need comprehensive, individualized approaches.
Clients often come to me thinking I have perfect eating habits, that I never touch anything "unhealthy." The truth is way more nuanced. What is healthy eating, really? Is it cutting out everything that might be considered less nutritious? Or is it being able to eat a variety of foods without obsession, guilt, or compulsive behaviors?
I believe it's the latter, but I also recognize that for those of us with eating disorder histories, the path there might look different than it does for others. Are there foods I still avoid because I'm worried they might trigger old patterns? Yes, and right now, that's okay. I'm in the best relationship with food I've had since before I was 12, and if keeping that means continuing to avoid certain trigger foods, I consider that a victory, not a limitation.
Recovery for me has meant freedom from food constantly occupying my mind. It means being able to eat a meal with family or friends without immediately planning where and when I can throw up. It means not spending hours each day thinking about what I'll eat, when I'll eat it, and how I'll deal with the aftermath.
This freedom - not perfection, but freedom - is what I want other people to experience. I start every client consultation by explaining that nothing will shock me, that there's no need to be embarrassed about their relationship with food. So many people carry these struggles alone, thinking they're the only ones with such "weird" eating patterns.
One of the most important parts of my work is helping reduce the shame around dysfunctional eating. The stigma attached to eating disorders is intense and often stops people from opening up and talking about it - specifically bulimia and binge eating. I've found that sharing my own story – with appropriate boundaries – helps others to understand that recovery is possible and that they're not alone in their struggles.
For parents, teachers, and yoga instructors, I really emphasize learning to recognize the signs of disordered eating. Early intervention can make a huge difference, but it requires awareness and the courage to have difficult conversations.
I also work to educate people about the reality that eating disorders don't care about your appearance, profession, or how "together" your life looks from the outside. Some of my most successful-looking clients have been privately battling severe eating disorder symptoms for years.
The journey from hidden patient to healing practitioner has taught me that our struggles don't have to define us, but they can definitely inform our ability to help others. Every day, I'm grateful for the chance to offer hope based on lived experience, to sit with others in their darkest food-related struggles, and to witness the profound transformation that's possible when someone finds freedom from the chaos of disordered eating.
If you're reading this and recognizing your own story, please know that recovery is possible. It might not look the way you imagine, and it'll probably be slower than you hope, but each small step toward freedom matters. You don't have to do it alone, and you don't have to do it perfectly.
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