Lady Diana battled eating disorder, ex-secretary reveals
LONDON: The late Lady Diana battled the eating disorder anorexia, her former private secretary has revealed.
The former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, during a discussion at a Hudson Society event in New York City, disclosed: “I can’t say a particular time I fi rst noticed her anorexia, but it dawned on me that my relationship with food is unhealthy but it’s pretty straight forward. I like food, the more the merrier.”
Added Jephson: “And eating royal, you get to eat some very nice meals. And you also have to eat kind of on duty, and you have to eat some strange things in strange countries for good diplomatic reasons.”
Diana had a hard time fitting into her role as a princess, especially following her divorce from Prince Charles, according to Jephson.
“But Diana, she ultimately, very bravely admitted that she had a relationship with food which she described it herself, was ‘her wish to disappear’.”
“It’s perhaps a little complicated, and I’m no psychiatrist. But she had felt like an outsider. She had felt that way as a young girl, and certainly still did as a princess,” was how he put it.
But Lady Diana soldiered on and turned it to her advantage, he said, adding: “She turned that to advantage. She said to me, ‘one of the reasons I can talk to people who are in great need and who are suffering great hardship, who are excluded, is that I’m one of them.’”