Good Girls Do Swallow

'Whenever I ate a tub of ice cream I replaced it with another and another until I understood that food was plentiful and bountiful and I started to crave vegetables and rice and cous-cous. It's the most liberating experience in the world.

'I believe people gain weight because they diet. When you go on a diet what do you think about? Food. When you restrict something from your life what do you want? The thing you resist. When your boyfriend dumps you, who do you want? You want him. You want what you can't have.

'You have to take away the emotional attachment to food and stop thinking Mars Bars are evil and lettuce is good. Food isn't evil, it is just an inanimate object. Take your bathroom scales - you are asking an inanimate object whether you are worthwhile or not. You wouldn't ask a table how you were looking would you?'

I don't ask her how much she weighs. It seems insignificant under the circumstances. Instead I want to know how she feels about her body now? 'I went from a size 8 to a size 16 in one year when I had binge eating disorder,' she says. 'Now I'm an Australian size 12 and that's not through dieting. I do a lot of walking. I was doing yoga for a long time but I've been too busy recently, which is a shame because it's the one thing that really calms me, and I go to the gym… sometimes.'

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