Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Bein frien save each us fro anore
Bonding during tre them back from br
Apizza night might sound the norm for most people. But for these three friends, it is a real celebration. The trio of young women – Lara Ferguson, Ellie Markham and Lizzie Nice – have all been close to death after suffering from anorexia.
But, incredibly, the disease has been their salvation too, because when they met at a unit for young people with eating disorders they forged a friendship that has given them a future worth living.
“I don’t know where I’d be without Ellie and Lizzie,” Lara, 18, says. “Out of something so awful, I’ve gained two friendships I’ll treasure for ever, and we’re all ready to make happier memories than the ones we have.”
At one point Lara didn’t know if she would live to make memories. Her problems started when she was 13, and developed into depression and OCD, which all centred around food.
“I started to hear voices, telling me that if I ate certain foods, my family would die,” she says. “I became convinced that food was poisoned. I’d always loved my food and was dubbed the ice cream queen because I loved it so much. I’d even mix peanut butter into it. But now it terrified me.”
Although somehow Lara maintained a healthy weight, she began self-harming too. She even tried to take her own life.
It was such a worry for her parents, Alison and James. Eventually she was taken to Sheffield Children’s Hospital, where she was tube fed and given antipsychotic medication.
“They made me put on weight, which made me feel uncomfortable,” she remembers. “But the worst thing was that everything felt out of my control.”
So when she came out of hospital a few months later, the only thing Lara felt she could control was what she ate.
“The only safe foods for me were Snack-a-jacks and carrot mash, but it had to be the one from the Co-op,” she says. “I was losing so much weight, my parents were scared. So when the Co-op announced it was discontinuing it, Dad drove around all their stores in the city and bought as many packets as he could.”
For Lara, the loneliness of anorexia was one of the worst things. She barely attended school, and spent all her time obsessively exercising in her room.
It is something Lizzie, 20, understands all too well. “Like Lara, I barely had any friends. All the girls at school were going out shopping while I was pacing up and down in my room for hours on end, trying to work off the watery soup I’d had for dinner,” she remembers.
Lizzie says she was a very anxious child, and a perfectionist. “I became obsessed about ‘safe’ foods, like salads and soups. I’d always been a healthy size eight to 10 but the weight dropped off quickly. It’s not about looking in the mirror and thinking you’re fat, it’s a control thing, something the other girls understand only too well. They know exactly how isolating anorexia is, which was why I think we’ve bonded so well.”
Ellie agrees. “I was at uni and loving life. I was studying adult nursing, lived zo Th thou
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Sh was Lara wrap