Funny girl Rachael Oakes-Ash thought she would have it all if she was thin. After a lifetime of eating disorders it is only now, having given up dieting, she's discovered she can

Rachael Oakes-Ash has led a life of extremes. She had her first orgasm at the age of three and was binge eating by the age of 11. It was to be the start of a life dominated by extreme behaviour - one that saw her lose and gain more than nine and a half stone in 14 years.

Between the ages of 17 and 31 Oakes-Ash battled anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder. She ran up huge debts, slept around, took too many drugs, drank and flogged herself silly in the gym.

Now, aged 34, this warm and striking Australian says she is, 'cured of my disordered eating and my attitude to my disordered eating. As a result everything else has calmed down too. I lead a life of moderation and I work very hard at it.' This from the woman who once said her life was 'all or nothing'.

Oakes-Ash, who describes herself as a 'producer, presenter, writer and humorist' has since documented her life in the autobiography Good Girls Do Swallow (Mainstream Publishing £7.99).

So who does she think will read it? 'I hope any women who has ever gone on a diet will buy it, any women who has ever trawled her credit card or had an impulsive PMT purchase, any women who has been ditched by her boyfriend then found herself shopping madly or drinking madly or eating madly,' she says.

Any woman who can read this book and not identify with at least a handful of Rachael's razor-sharp insights is a lucky one. There will be very few who fail to take away its powerful message - stop dieting.

Rachael Oakes-Ash's own problems stemmed from an almost pathological desire for perfection, which started as a child. She wanted a Carol Brady mum but the reality couldn't have been further from the ideal. Later she craved the spotlight - to be thin, famous and adored. That she achieved the latter three seems irrelevant when weighed up against the emotional cost. Throughout her teen and adult life she blamed her fat or thin body for a multitude of events, including her failure to get a job and being raped at 19.

'We are constantly bombarded with images that tell us we can have the perfect life,' she says. 'We are told we must be a size eight, have flawless skin, always look young and have a partner. But it's completely unrealistic.

'While we are constantly comparing ourselves to what we believe is the perfect life we are always going to fail because no one has that life. Everything is so much easier when you realise that there is no such thing.'

There was only one other body that she hated as much as her own and that was her mother's. To her the homely figure represented what she herself could become.

'People say to me "you are so brave to write a book like this", she says. 'I tell them "I'm not the brave one, my mother is the bravest person in the world." She knew what was in the book, I gave her the manuscript a thousand times to read. I gave her every opportunity to say "I don't want this in, I don't want that in" and she choose to keep it all in.

'She felt guilty, as any mother would, and I told her there was nothing to feel guilty about because when I was bulimic how would she ever have known? Bulimia is a private, private illness so you're not going to be shouting it from the rooftops.

'I could sit around and blame her for not being the perfect mum but what is the perfect mum?' she says. 'At the end of the day if you want to get over an eating disorder or whatever issues you have in your life then you have to accept where you came from. If you can accept your mother's imperfections, you are a long way to accepting your own.'

Her next project is a book about female competition. Anything She Can Do I Can Do Better - it will be another personal insight into Rachael's life.

'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'.

'It is so hard to start with but it's the only answer. I had to legalise all my foods and I had to say that a Mars Bar was equal to a lettuce and that when I was hungry I could eat whatever I wanted regardless of the calorie content. I did this until I understood that I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted; suddenly I stopped eating tubs of ice cream.

'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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