Interview: My journey to the edge of death and back

AT 15 years old Catherine Kerr-Phillips felt if she lost weight she’d be more popular. She ended up nearly starving herself to death. Nicki Slater reports.

AT first glance, Catherine Kerr-Phillips is the girl you want to be. Tall, tanned, blonde and laughing, she oozes confidence and health from every pore.

But in her new book, Hoping For Rain, Catherine, who was brought up in Hebden Bridge before moving to France, tells about her lifelong battle with anorexia nervosa, a condition affecting approximately one in 100 women aged between 15 and 30. An intense and often harrowing read, Hoping for Rain surprises with genuine moments of warmth and humour, which provide relief from the graphic detail Catherine found absolutely necessary when writing.

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“I wanted to take the reader by the hand and literally drag them through the journey with me,” Catherine, 28, recalls. “It’s supposed to be an upsetting read. Anorexics have this meek and mild appearance but they’re full of self-hatred, this boiling horrible turmoil of black depression. I wanted to say how I really felt and what really happened, no matter how humiliating or hard it was. People need to know just how degrading anorexia is, and how desperate you get.”

Research suggests girls as young as five have weight concerns and think about going on a diet, and in schools like the one Catherine attended, a startling proportion of young women have eating disorders.

“Most of the pressure on me came from women,” Catherine remembers. “I got badly bullied at school, which was strange because I then found out that many of the girls who were bullying me had eating disorders themselves.”

From the magazines she read, to the classmates surrounding her, Catherine was continually bombarded with overwhelming pressure to be thin and attractive, and she yearned for social acceptance.

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“I went to a grammar school and there was a huge divide between the cool, rich kids and our weird little group,” she admits.

“I thought if I was thin I would be cool and popular, but teenagers are so cruel. I was always very aware of people’s stares: it was like I was a monster. When I reached my target weight, I just carried on, because I always felt that people would laugh at me if I put the weight back on. As a teenager, you’re so focused on fitting in you don’t realise how damaging you’re being to other people.”

Catherine found weight loss irresistibly compelling because she attracted compliments and attention from the same classmates who had once bullied her.

“Losing weight is fascinating. Everyone suddenly starts complimenting you, and then you just think that the more weight you lose the more compliments you’ll get. You strive for absolute perfection and can’t see anything else.

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“But the closer to perfection you get, the more it eludes you. Obviously, some of the things I was doing were crazy. I actually fractured my foot but continued to run because I had to. It’s all about filling a void that should be filled with love, or contentedness. I’m happy with myself now, which is a really big step.”

Catherine saw her weight loss as a kind of quiet rebellion against the pressures she experienced at school.

“Most teenagers explode. I always think that anorexic teenagers are people who implode. It’s a kind of a way for them to stage a teenage rebellion without making a mess.” In recent years there have been very disturbing developments in attitudes towards eating disorders, particularly in young women and schoolchildren.

“The attitude towards anorexia is so skewed,” Catherine says. “I remember when I was about five and three-quarter stone and a girl came up to me and said: ‘You’re so skinny’. When I responded that I had an eating disorder, she said: ‘I wish I could be anorexic’.”

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“Pro-anorexia” websites are indicative of this seismic shift in attitudes towards female body image. “Pro-anorexia websites are really damaging,” sighs Catherine. “These poor girls take obscene pictures of themselves looking dangerously thin and leave comments like ‘I love your ribs.’ But the thing is, I might have found those pictures attractive when I was in that mindset. I didn’t look thin to me: all I could see was my six-pack and biceps. I remember having a long stand in front of the mirror, trying to see myself as I really was. But it’s incredibly difficult, and I was addicted to my shrinking frame. My perception would flicker between genuinely thinking I looked attractive, and realising how ill I was. Even now, it’s hard to see myself the way I really am.”

Even when Catherine started to develop clear symptoms of chronic starvation, she was completely incapable of linking them with her dramatic weight loss or extreme health regime.

“Its amazing how deluded I was. I remember going to the doctor when I was around five and a half stone and I literally didn’t believe it. I thought the scales were wrong. It was mind over matter and I was so convinced that I was eating healthily, exercising and living a healthy lifestyle. My hair started snapping off because I had so few nutrients in my body, but I blamed it on the conditioner I was using. I became incontinent and started growing hair all over my body, but it takes a hell of a lot for an anorexic to admit they have a problem. Even when I found myself stopping breathing and unable to think, I didn’t connect it with not eating.”

Catherine eventually accepted she was chronically ill and needed to seek help.

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“It sounds melodramatic, but at one point I could actually feel myself dying. I remember sitting in lessons and thinking I couldn’t actually see a way out of it, but then I had this point where I thought: ‘I’m either going to go insane, or I’m going to die, or I’m going to do something about this’ Those were the only choices. It was still extremely hard for me to eat, but I just suddenly thought: ‘I’m sick. I need to eat. I can have anything!’ I remember devouring a huge bowl of cereal while mentally running through all the nutrients it would bring me. That really helped me block out the voices telling me not to eat.”

For Catherine, another crucial part of recovery was speaking to people and finding out as much as she could about what she was doing to her body.

“I needed physical advice, so I thought I’d go and see my biology teacher. I asked her to tell me what I’d done to myself in physical terms, and she explained that my body had been feeding off the fat protecting my heart, kidneys and eyeballs, and had probably started on my brain, which is why it was starting to shut down. When she put it like that, I guessed I could manage a hamburger.”

Catherine cites women’s magazines as a major factor in the development of her anorexia. “Magazines are horrible to women,” Catherine says. “Teenagers are so desperate to fit in that they follow diet plans to the letter, but the advice is so contradictory. All the conflicting diet plans are really dangerous because, to an anorexic person, it’s like there’s nothing safe to eat. You find one magazine saying you can eat a certain food and another saying its bad for you, and it prompts a feeling of utter dread in case you do something wrong and put on half a pound. But, unfortunately, weight loss sells.” Since recovering from her anorexia, Catherine has worked as a model and an actress, and is often in front of the camera. She laughs often, and appears so comfortable in her own skin it is almost impossible to equate her with the scared, self-conscious teenager brought to life in her book.

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“I used to hate being seen by people, but I have no problem with it now,” Catherine smiles. “People say you can’t be cured from anorexia, but it can become a part of you and you can feel calm again.

“The thing about anorexic people is that they are inwardly very turbulent, that they always feel very panicky and depressed, but you can reverse it and you can find inner peace.”

ANOREXIA NERVOSA - THE FACTS

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterised by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight and an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Research from the Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests anorexia nervosa is most likely to strike during the mid-teenage years. The disease affects approximately one in 150 15-year-old females and one in 1,000 15-year-old males. While 40 per cent of people with anorexia recover completely, around 30 per cent will continue to experience the illness long-term. Hoping for Rain by Catherine Kerr-Philips is available at www.amazon.com.

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