Eighteen-Year-Old Girl Beat Anorexia to Become a Model

Alice Mitchell, 18, from Canterbury, Kent, now weighs a healthy nine stone but was once so slender that her hair started falling out in thick clumps and her organs were beginning to shut down.

Despite the teenager weighing just over five stone when she was at her worst, she would still step on the scales up to 40 times a day in the hope that she had lost more weight.

‘A former anorexic who barely ate has beaten the killer illness to become a model and actress.’

Now on the road to recovery, Alice credits her career ambitions as the reason she wanted to get better. "I've always been very driven with my career so when I was at my worst I knew that I needed to get better so I could chase my dream of becoming an actress and model," she said. "At my worst I could barely eat a tablespoon of food and if I did it'd take me about three hours, my body was shutting down and I could barely breathe let alone perform."

Before Alice became anorexic at 15, she had a binge disorder where she would eat more than 4,500 calories a day. "At its worst, between the ages of around seven to 11 when I should have been eating around 1,800 calories a day, I was consuming anything up to 4,500 calories a day," she said.

She never liked the way she looked and was bullied for being overweight which led her into a downward spiral of never eating more than 50 calories a day. It was only when the doctors had given her just a month to live after her body began shutting down at the end of 2013, that she knew she needed to do something.

For the past two years she has been working on her recovery and has managed to get her weight up to roughly nine stone - but knows that she will never be 'fully' recovered. "I would never say that I've beaten anorexia, I don't think you can ever fully recover and I still remember being five stone like it was yesterday," she said.

Source: Medindia