Good Girls Do Swallow

'Most women have competed at some stage or other,' she says. 'Whether you do it openly or not, you still think competitive thoughts. Men are overt about their competition, they do it on the sports field or in the work place and it's OK for them. But women are told that competition equals aggression and that aggression is not feminine.

'If we'd been brought up to understand that, yes, we are going to have competitive feelings, then perhaps we wouldn't be so bitchy to each other.'

In Good Girls Do Swallow Rachael explains how dieting compounded her competitive streak. 'There was one girl I dieted with who I always competed with,' she says. 'If we went to a bar she would practically stand on my head in her stilettos to get to the man at the end of the bar before I did.

'Diet pals are just another form of female competition. You want to lose more weight than your friend so you start getting obsessed by the question "what did you eat?" Your entire relationship revolves around calories. Whoever wins will end up being hated by the other.'

Oakes-Ash's own road to recovery came after a bout of reactive depression. 'There had been so many times where I went for help but didn't go through with it,' she says. 'But, the final, final time was when I had reactive depression because I remembered being raped. I started eating and I couldn't stop. I didn't go out of my house for four days. I didn't have a shower or clean my teeth for four days and I finally realised "I have to do something because I cannot live like this".'

The answer? 'Don't diet'.