I wish I had bulimia like Princess Diana, says Fergie
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
THE Duchess of York, a self-confessed binge eater who admitted to hoarding food in Buckingham Palace ‘like a squirrel hiding her acorns’, has had a long history of weight problems.
In a startling new admission she now says she wishes she had bulimia like her late sister-in-law, Princess Diana. Fergie, 57, makes the confession in an interview about overcoming food addiction with Dr Vijay Murthy, whose London clinic she regularly attends.
Last year, she accompanied Murthy on a two-week trip to India to learn more about ayurvedic medicine, an ancient Indian system using herbal compounds, special diets and unorthodox health practices.
‘I never could get bulimia because I
just didn’t have that mental state to go that far, but I always wished I could,’ she says.
‘But that just shows you how dangerous and what place I got to. To wish you could have a mental illness to that level is a very serious place to get to.’
Bulimia is an emotional disorder associated with poor body image and an obsessive urge to diet.
Sufferers indulge in bouts of extreme overeating followed by self-induced vomiting.
Asked how she got into such a state, she replies: ‘My body and mind was in that place, but I couldn’t actually act out to make myself sick.’
As a result, Fergie’s weight ballooned. ‘I then grew and grew and grew, because I couldn’t do the final bit, because it just didn’t seem to resonate with me.’
Of her food addiction and public perception, she says: ‘People say to me: “Oh you’re too spontaneous, you do this” . . . I did not accept it for so many years and that was the persecution and that’s why I tried to make myself as beautiful and thin as Princess Diana or Elle Macpherson.
‘I tried and of course it never went that way.’
Fergie, once cruelly nicknamed the Duchess of Pork, became the face of Weight Watchers in the U.S.
She credited her recent 3st weight loss to a diet of mayonnaise, tomatoes and mandarins.