‘I hid my anorexia from everyone for years’

To mark Eating Disorders Awareness Week, which began on Monday (27 February), HOPE VIRGO describes her experience of anorexia and how it led her to campaign for better treatment of the condition

Interview by Sarah Olowofoyeku

ON the cusp of her teenage years, Hope Virgo made a new ‘best friend’. This friend helped her to deal with how she was feeling and to choose what she would eat and how she would exercise. The more she listened to her friend, the better she felt about everything. But that friend wasn’t a person. It turned out not even to be her friend. It was her eating disorder.

‘The disorder was caused by different factors,’ she says, ‘predominantly by me not wanting to feel emotion. I had been sexually abused, and I was driven to a place where I had to find a way to deal with how I was feeling, a way to numb all these emotions. The eating disorder became a coping mechanism. It gave me a sense of purpose. It helped me to keep going.’

Today Hope works as a mental health campaigner. During Eating Disorders Awareness Week, she will be running sessions in schools and visiting parliament to persuade MPs to support people affected by the condition. Her message is the same as every year: that people can fully recover from eating disorders and that these conditions are often hidden

Turn to page 6 f in plain sight.

For a while, Hope’s anorexia was a secret problem.

‘I hid it from everyone for around four years,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, and I didn’t think there was anything the matter with me.’

By the time she was 17, people around her noticed that she was not OK and she was referred to the children and adolescent mental health services.

‘Even then, I couldn’t accept I had a problem,’ she recalls. ‘I spent six months as an outpatient, but every week I would lie my way through, pretending everything was fine. But really I was struggling. I remember getting up in the mornings and weighing myself, looking in the mirror, berating myself and then going to school, putting on a happy face. Looking back, I was always cold, always tired and always thinking about food. But I didn’t see any of that as a red flag that something wasn’t right.

‘Eventually, after six months, I was admitted to a treatment centre, where I spent a year living in recovery, learning about food, exercise and how to talk about the eating disorder.

‘I spent the first three days so angry and frustrated. I couldn’t get my head around what I was doing there or what was happening. One night a nurse came to see me and she brought these massive pieces of paper. She marked my head and feet on one of them and asked me to draw myself.

‘I drew an outline of my body. I then had to lie down on the same piece of paper and she traced round the outside of me. The images were so different. I remember at the time thinking that she’d lied to me. But I had this realisation that there was something seriously wrong with the way I viewed myself. That night I told myself I was just going to start eating a little bit and see what happened.

‘Over the next couple of months, I began to work harder at the programme. I did a lot of therapy and had a lot of additional support.’

That was about 15 years ago. Hope is doing much better now, but would describe her recovery as ongoing.

‘Something that’s worth saying about eating disorders is that physically people can change,’ she says, ‘but mentally it takes such a long time for things to catch up. I remember people would notice that I’d put on weight, but I’d be thinking: “Mentally I’m still really struggling.” You have to get to a place where you start to communicate what is going on and what your needs are.’

After a year in treatment, Hope was able to function, although the prospect of recovery was still scary. When she relapsed in 2016, she was refused help because she was deemed to be at a healthy weight. Hope’s experience with the mental health service and statutory treatment led her to start the Dump the Scales campaign, which wants to stop treatment decisions being based solely on a person’s weight.

‘So much of the time we get someone to a space where they’re functioning,’ she says, ‘but they’re not fully recovered. Their weight might be at a certain BMI, but they’ve still got work to do and they don’t know how to live in the real world. I didn’t know how to choose something off a menu, I didn’t know how to shop for clothes. And I think that then adds a level of shame to things.’

Hope had grown up in a churchgoing family, but her faith was impacted after she was sexually abused. By the time she was admitted to the mental health hospital, she says, she had stopped believing.

‘I couldn’t understand why God wouldn’t heal me, why God would put me through something, that God would allow someone to abuse me and that this would be the outcome. I was so angry about it. I hated faith, I hated Christianity. I didn’t like the fact that no one had any answers to my

Some years after leaving the mental health hospital, Hope decided to open up about her abuse and take the matter to

‘I felt my life imploding,’ she says. ‘I was hurting so much and working 24/7 to cope. One day I was crying on the Tube and someone spoke to me about their faith. Then my godmother kept telling me to go to church, so I thought I would give it a go. The first time I went, I wanted what everyone I saw there had – they looked so at peace.’

Hope took part in a course that allowed her to explore more about Christianity. ‘I became a Christian a couple of years ago,’ she says.

Although her problems did not disappear, it did change her as a person.

‘I got to a space where I had to find a way to move forward,’ she says. ‘Faith is a big part of that now. When I’m having a difficult day, I try to read Scripture, pray and listen to worship music. I’m not great at it, but I try to know that, when my struggles do feel impossible, God is there throughout.

‘Sometimes I’m at peace with not being completely healed and sometimes I’m not, but it has been important for me to make space where I can feel anger at God and be honest about that with people. I used to be afraid of being angry, thinking he would punish me, but the more I learnt about God, the less I felt that. I think it’s healthy to sometimes be angry with God.’

Thanks to her life experiences, Hope is able to help others.

‘For me, it’s about speaking up,’ she says, ‘sharing my experience, changing best practice and making sure that every single person can access support. It’s about making sure that they know they can change and things can get better. It’s about bringing those conversations into the light, because only when we are in the light can people really heal.’