I didn’t just turn around one day and decide to stop eating...

BY the time Jade McDonald was sectioned and admitted to a young persons’ psychiatric ward with an eating disorder, she was barely having any food at all.

What had begun as a ‘summer diet’ when Jade was 15 years old, had spiralled into a dangerous relationship with food that nearly ended her life.

The teenager from Bury hid her illness from friends and family who started to notice her weight loss. At first people told her she looked good for it.

She visited her a GP, who she says told her she was underweight – but not dangerously so. Jade was told to come back if she continued to lose weight.

Six months later, Jade was admitted to the Horizon Ward at Fairfield Hospital – a mental health unit for patients with eating disorders.

Medical professionals were left with no choice but to section Jade under the Mental Health Act. They feared if her illness continued, she could die.

After a year of self-harm, multiple suicide attempts, tube-feeding and round-the-clock care, Jade was released from hospital and is now back at home.

Now 19, she is pushing to change the way society views eating disorders and wants to use her story as a reminder that being anorexic is not just about being underweight.

“When people ask me when it all started I struggle to give a definitive answer,” Jade says. “I didn’t just turn around one day and decide to stop eating, or decide that I wanted to die.”

Jade said it was when she turned 15 that things started to change for her, both mentally and physically.

“I’d set myself a challenge of having no form of sugary foods over the entire summer and going to the gym as much as possible,” she says. “My challenge to become healthier and cut out sugar manifested into slowly cutting out other foods, not allowing myself to even taste them.

“I didn’t want to break this perfect record I’d built of not even letting the food touch my lips.” By the time Jade reached her GCSEs, she was spending two hours a night at the gym – running to burn off the little food she had eaten that day. She had also begun to use selfharm as a coping mechanism after suffering severe bouts of depression. Having noticed her daughter’s weight loss had developed into more than just a summer fad, Jade’s mother took her to the see the local GP.

A doctor weighed Jade and told her that she was underweight but was not in the ‘dangerous’ zone.

They told her that if she continued to lose weight then she needed to book another appointment.

“That’s like telling a person who’s broken their leg to come back once all of their bones are broken,” Jade says. “It only ignited the anorexic voice in me. It told me I was clearly too fat to be ill and that I needed to lose more weight.”

After that, Jade quickly turned into an ‘unrecognisable’ person – lying to those closest to her if it meant she didn’t have to consume weight-gaining calories.

“The lying became an elaborate drama-piece, making sure I’d sprinkled some crumbs at the bottom of my breakfast bowl to make it look like I’d eaten. I’d tell my friends that I had food waiting at home for me, and I’d tell my family that I’d eaten at a friend’s.”

It wasn’t until the evidence that Jade’s rapidly declining weight was firmly stacked against her, that she admitted to health professionals the true extent of what was going on. “It doesn’t matter how many appointments I had, how many times I was told my heart was under strain and needed a pacemaker,” Jade says. “Anorexia makes you lose sight of the important things in life.”

In February 2016, Jade was admitted to hospital where she spent over a year, with the help of medical professionals, to mend the broken pieces.

“Psychiatric wards aren’t like what you imagine,” says Jade.

“Sure, there are moments of screaming, banging and some nights I would cry myself to sleep wishing that I could just be ‘normal.’ But the majority of the time it’s encouraging your friends to eat when they’re struggling, it’s spending hours playing Connect Four with your dad during visits, or falling asleep on the chair with your mum because the medication knocks you out. It’s learning that after everything has been stripped away from you, your health and happiness are the only real important things in life.”

A year on, in February 2017, Jade was discharged and referred to the Community Eating Disorders Service (CEDS) – part of Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust.

They provide specialist care and support in the community to help young people avoid being admitted to hospital, or assistance once they’ve been discharged.

Jade says that without the recovery and support of services like CEDS, she wouldn’t be here today.

“Either anorexia or depression would have killed me, it’s as simple as that,” she says.

“Without recovery I wouldn’t have been able to jump out of a plane at 15,000ft, eat cake not just on my birthday but whenever I feel like it, become a Beat (Beat Eating Disorders) ambassador or go on nights out feeling confident enough to wear clothes that actually touch my skin.”

But Jade says there are still too many misconceptions surrounding eating disorders and hopes that services such as CEDS will help to challenge that picture.

“Anorexia, or any eating disorder for that matter, is nothing to do with idolising skinny models and celebrities,” Jade says. “Society still holds the belief that you have to be underweight to have an eating disorder, but that could not be further from the truth.

“I have struggled the most when I have been a healthy weight.

“The fact that you can now receive support from trained professionals even if you’re not mirroring society’s face of anorexia, is truly amazing.”

Where Jade used to look on with confusion at people with scars on their arms, or who struggled to eat a slice of bread – she now understands. “I now understand that a slice of bread to someone with an eating disorder isn’t just a slice of bread,” she says.

“I never thought I’d be ‘the anorexic’ or ‘the girl who tried to kill herself.’”

This summer, Jade passed her A-level exams and is now two stages through the RAF recruitment process. She hopes to become a paramedic.

Thanks to the help of services like CEDS and her own determination, Jade now sees her eating disorder as something she ‘had’ and not something she ‘has.’