Rachel Egan

*trigger warning-this post does contain descriptions of eating disorder behaviours and suicidal feelings

Winter 2010: It’s my second year at university and all my flatmates are out at night. I know what’s about to happen and I promise myself this will be the very last time. The last time I make a panic-driven trip to Lidl and come home to binge on endless boxes of dry cereal, bread, biscuits and cereal bars before taking shit tonnes of laxatives and hunkering down in the bathroom for the night waiting for them to take effect and purge me of my sins.

Outwardly, I am the best I have ever been. My anorexic body is fading fast as I am rapidly gaining weight and eating any food left around, even if it belongs to somebody else. I feel a lot of guilt and shame about this, but I am too embarrassed to tell anyone. After 5 years of being massively underweight, A+E trips, and looking like a gust of wind might take me out I am finally starting to look like an adult woman with curves and from the outside, it looks like the danger of the eating disorder has passed.

But internally, I feel the worst I ever have. The only thing stopping me from killing myself is that I want to lose weight again before I die.

I’m very suicidal, living in a constant cycle of starving myself throughout the day, spending hours in the gym then binge-eating at night. I’ve tried making myself sick but the bottom line is that I am not a very good vomiter.

But I need something to deal with the guilt after a binge, so I turned to laxatives.

I can buy them in multiple packs in Superdrug or Boots and nobody bats an eyelid. I’ve learnt to avoid pharmacies because the staff often ask difficult questions about my so called “constipation”.

I think I know that they aren’t making me any thinner, but I have become addicted to the pain they cause when you overdose .I’ve convinced myself that I am completely worthless; that I can’t control myself around food and for that I deserve to have severe abdominal pain, to walk around wearing nappies in case I have an accident and to struggle with muscle spasms and fatigue. (All common side effects of laxative misuse).

Except tonight there is an issue; I’m bleeding afterwards. I know that rectal bleeding is a very bad sign and it can mean an internal rupture which can lead to sepsis, anaemia or permanent bowel disease. I dash up from the bathroom to look it up online and the advice is to seek medical care as soon as possible.

I am in a panic over what to do. I am very concerned that I have caused serious damage over months of laxative abuse but I am too embarrassed to tell a medical professional what has been going on or that I did this to myself. Last time I mentioned my eating disorder to my GP, and how I was struggling with binge-eating he shrugged his shoulders and told me it was good for me to gain weight anyway. I felt dismissed.

So I didn’t come forwards for help. I gave up laxatives immediately and tried to forge a way forwards without them. It stopped the immediate danger but my eating disorder didn’t magically disappear overnight.

Summer 2024: 14 years later and I’ve made it through another two anorexia relapses, one parental death and a global pandemic. I’m married now, working full-time and while I am not fully recovered, I am in a much better position than I was back then. I no longer hate myself, or my body and even though it is hard and sometimes I fall back into restrictive eating habits, or over-exercise, I do try hard to limit the damage and reach out for help when I need it.

I am shopping in Superdrug for some new make-up and some toiletries when and I notice the following sign:

I’m instantly transported to those Dark Days when I hid laxatives around my uni bedroom, and took them out with me during the day in case I ate something ‘bad’. But this time, I notice that something’s changed.

Somebody has recognised the dangers that laxatives pose to people like me and they are trying to help. Or at least slow down the destruction by making it hard to buy more than one packet at a time and refusing to sell laxatives to anybody under the age of 18. (Eating disorders are most prevalent among children and young people aged 8-18).

I know a lot of work from eating disorders activists and medical professionals would have gone into this.

Policy change, especially around mental health is painfully slow and sadly, often only comes about as the result of high profile cases where somebody dies.

Eating disorders, unlike depression and anxiety are still widely misunderstood, invisible illnesses and when you are stuck on a waiting list for over 13 months without a single phone call from the eating disorder service it’s easy to feel like your life or your illness doesn’t matter.

I’ve often wondered how sick I have to get for people to take notice, or how much weight do I have to lose again before people get concerned. It’s easy to feel like your secret eating disorder life is invisible and it doesn’t matter.

But it does. And there are people out there fighting for change and fighting to keep us safe.

For more information and support on eating disorders please visit Beat

Information on laxative abuse and the dangers of misusing laxatives:

Click to access LaxativeUse.pdf