A former teacher has described the lengths she would go to in order to keep her eating disorder hidden from friends and family as she continues to push towards complete recovery.
She said: "I also was very aware of diets and diet culture and all the different slimming and weight loss clubs that existed and I was always surrounded by that. Then when my low moods started my depression started to push into my relationship with food and my body and over the course of a few months in my final year in school I had started to develop an eating disorder that started with bulimia and then continued in secret for years.
"There were times in the evening when all my family were in bed and I would eat as much as possible, not tasting anything and then take myself into the garden and be sick in a bag and throw it over the fence. It is embarrassing to say but that was how brutal and dark things had got and the things that I was doing to myself and what the eating disorder was convincing me that I had to do, it was really difficult.
Niamh continued: "I knew that there was something going on, but I was kind of in denial and it was my mum that came to me and said ‘this is not you, something is really going on here and it's serious.’ Niamh said that many of her friends did not know that she had been battling the disorder until she released her book Struggling to Breathe and that her relationships have strengthened now that she is able to talk freely about her condition and what she had been going through.
Oh it’s so cool now to have issues or mental health issues . Bore off