Former bulimia sufferer Martha Connolly describes her experience of living with an eating disorder
A life with an eating disorder is no life. It is a desperately lonely and indescribably horrible existence.
At 17, I was a happy, slim, bright and attractive young girl with good grades, great pals, plenty of admirers, a loving family and an exceptionally outgoing personality.
Four years later I barely left the house, I had severed contact with most of my friends and I was considering suicide. My worst days were spent bingeing and vomiting alone in the upstairs bathroom of the house I shared with four other students.
My bulimia was so out of control that I regularly found myself stealing housemates' food and eating from bins when the entire sum of my monthly allowance had been spent on binge food, often before the middle of the month.
My skin had deteriorated; my teeth were eroding from the stomach acid brought up through continuous vomiting; my hair had thinned and I no longer menstruated.
I had gone from being a healthy nine-and-a-half-stone stunner to a seven-stone wreck. My family were distraught and completely inconsolable. I will never forget the look of pain and helplessness in my father's eyes when he looked at me.
While the complex development of an eating disorder cannot be attributed to one single factor, it is without doubt that bombardment by insidious images of the unhealthily thin plays a major role in the proliferation of eating disorders.
I know this through experience.
My recovery was not easy, and while today I am doing incredibly well, I still battle the demon whose nasty presence is welcomed forth by the unrealistic body shapes I see at the turn of each magazine page and flick of a television switch.
Even those without eating disorders, including my most confident and self-assured friends and family members, find these images depressing.
Thankfully, I was always of strong character, and equipped to just about keep the relentless demon at bay.
Others are not so lucky, and you see more of such people every day - the hollow-cheeked and the desperate. Bear in mind that with bulimia, sufferers are often of normal weight, so their healthy-looking figures can completely betray the horrendous torment that lies within.
So to parents and elders, please encourage your children and younger relatives to be happy in their skin no matter what, don't focus on weight and dieting and don't purchase those dreadful magazines.
To everyone else, but particularly the young girls who so often succumb to these illnesses, please remember that there is so much more to life than being thin.
After all, we're all going to grow old, wrinkly and beyond the rejuvenating power of trick photography some day, so why not enjoy yourself while you get there?
Life is too precious to risk spending it as a slave to food, particularly when multitudes around the world are dying daily through poverty-induced starvation.
• Martha Connolly is a freelance journalist.