I can't even begin to describe the physical and psychological pain and the torture of what it felt like to suffer from anorexia, but I'll give it my best shot.
Physical effects
I was continually hungry because I was starving myself
Extreme tiredness, you simply can't function properly - you have slow speech, your reactions are gone, you forget simple things
Simple tasks such as walking or getting dressed can be a struggle. There were times I couldn't even get out of a bath.
Inability to sleep at night due to the extreme exhaustion.
Forever feeling the cold. My hands, toes and feet all felt dead - in the winter it is torture
You have major digestive problems. Eating anything big leads to really bad bloated feelings, going to the toilet suffers immensely
Inability to keep food down, bringing it up if you eat too much
Dizzyness and low blood pressure, fainting, headaches
Psychological effects
Food dominates your thoughts every waking second of every hour of every day
Weighing yourself constantly, and panic if it's more than it should be
Extreme worry and loneliness, no drive
Low self-esteem, irrational sense of 'fatness'
Low libido and 'get up and go'
Other Irrational thoughts due to chemical changes in your brain, such as always counting calories and nutritional content on backs of packets
Feelings of guilt after eating something 'unhealthy'
Strong desires to exercise to burn it off
These are all of the symptoms I suffered from. Throw in the emotional pain I was suffering from too due to family and life events and you can see what a nightmare developing anorexia was for me.
Yet I carried on living in London, working from 5am in the morning to 6pm at night in the middle of the credit crunch. Banks were sinking by the day, articles and guides needed to be written. I had no time for friends, I was living in a flat I couldn't afford, I was walking to and from work each day (10 miles) and was barely surviving on very low levels of food and energy. Sure enough I ended up having a nervous breakdown in February 2009.
