Martha Connolly was just nine years old when she started running up and down the stairs in her home because she thought she was fat.
"And I wasn't fat. I was only a slip of a thing. When I look back at pictures now I say what on earth was I thinking?"
Martha (28) developed an eating disorder when she was 19. "But it had been brewing since I was a very, very young girl. I had a preoccupation with my size when I was far too young to have a preoccupation with my size," she recalls.
She started dieting in her teens. "I lost a bit of weight. I felt fantastic about myself, and people complimented me. And then I got addicted to it. If I ate nothing, I felt great. If I ate anything, I felt crap." She had become anorexic. She was underweight, her periods stopped and her hair thinned. Then she went through a bulimic phase, with binge eating and vomiting.
"I had been away in college so my mum and dad weren't able to keep an eye on me. But every time I came home, my weight was going down. My mum followed me to the bathroom and caught me vomiting."
She was admitted to hospital when she was 21. "I came out, relapsed and went through it all again, only worse. And I finally kicked it, but it wasn't an easy process by any means."
Alison Healy