STORIES IN INTERVIEWS
VERONICA LUCCIONI - HAVING A DAUGHTER WITH ANOREXIA
PUBLISHED: Sunday, March 26, 2023
NURFM WellBeing Host: Jack Hodgins
This Week on Wellbeing we are talking with Veronica Luccioni, who is a mother whose daughter went through anorexia. Following her daughter's recovery, Veronica founded The Elephant in the Room Foundation, a charity that aims to improve the lives of individuals with anorexia nervosa. She is on the show today to share her perspective as a mother having a child with anorexia, and how she went about helping her daughter with her anorexia.
In this episode Veronica talks about when she noticed the anorexia in her daughter, the symptoms she noticed of anorexia from her perspective as a mother, and how she helped her daughter recover.
Her body changed and she became skinnier and started wearing smaller clothes . . . she started fitting into those clothes again and she started wearing them so I told her 'No! you cannot be wearing those - you cannot be fitting into smaller and smaller clothes'. - Veronica Luccioni on this episode of Wellbeing.
CHRISTINE JAP - LIVING WITH ANOREXIA AS AN ADOLESCENT
PUBLISHED: Sunday, March 12, 2023
NURFM WellBeing Host: Jack Hodgins
This week on Wellbeing we are talking with Christine Jap about her anorexia journey. Christine started experiencing anorexia at age twelve and after a journey with it only recovered recently in 2017 while attending university. Today Christine is the PR officer for The Elephant In The Room Foundation, a charity that aims to improve the lives of individuals with Anorexia Nervosa. This is the sixth instalment in our 13 part series on Anorexia. This episode is the fourth and last with females that have had a journey with anorexia. Next week we cover the important topic of male anorexia.
In this episode, Christine talks about why she developed anorexia, the way she viewed food while going through anorexia, how her family tried to help her with her anorexia, how it impacted her daily life, her journey with recovery, the challenges of anorexia recovery and how recovering has impacted her life positively.
“Inside I knew there was something else going on, that it wasn't really my fault. Everyone was kinda just saying 'Oh this is your fault, you just don't want to get better'', so that reinforced my shame and negative thoughts” - Christine Jap on this episode of Wellbeing.
OUR STORIES
Here are the faces of our brave eating disorder warriors who share their stories so that you can learn from their experiences. They have lived through the illness firsthand and have spent countless hours researching Anorexia Nervosa (anorexia) and Bulimia Nervosa (bulimia). These are their stories...
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
MY STORY OF ANOREXIA
My Story
Male
Onset 13-19 yrs old
Lost 10-20% of original weight
More than 2 years suffering
Yes, seek medical help
1. Innocent Beginning
My story of anorexia begins about a year before it started developing. In the spring of 2013, I had a medical exam and found out I was about 75kg (165lbs). I was informed this made me slightly overweight for someone of my age and height, and was becoming quite self-conscious of this, particularly as I had to move up from a 32-inch waist for a 34-inch waist for my trousers around the same time. I was also quite concerned because my parents had and still have problems with their weight, and my mother is self-conscious about her own weight and tries to diet fairly often.
2. Anorexia Trigger
Weight Loss
When I started sixth form later that year, I resolved to try and get fitter. Since moving to sixth form from secondary school allowed me more independence, one way I used this was by trying to lose weight by eating less, picking healthier meals and watching my intake of fat and saturated fat, as well as exercising more by walking to my dad’s work instead of asking him to pick me up from the school campus. This started fairly harmlessly, and by the end of 2013 I had lost about 4 to 5kg and was back into a healthy weight range.
Unfortunately, my behaviour towards food and exercise grew more obsessive during 2014. I continued to lose weight without any real concern on the part of my friends and family for most of the first half of the year, and started doing exercises like press-ups daily as well as running on my way to and from sixth form when I could; I also tried to keep my fat and saturated fat intake as low as possible instead of just below the recommended 70g and 20g a day. Due to this, I lost another 8kg by Easter and by June, if I recall correctly, had lost around 5kg more; in the space of about a year, I had fallen from around 75kg to 57kg, and was also finding that I could fit in 30-inch and 32-inch waist trousers with no problem.
June of 2014 sticks out to me because, with hindsight, this was the point at which my behaviour started to seriously interfere with my mental state. I went on a trip with my class abroad, and found myself determinedly seeking opportunities to exercise more and to avoid eating. When I ate ice cream and chips with my friends, I felt intensely guilty about it even though I really enjoy those foods, and would try to do dozens of press-ups when I was alone to work off the calories. By the time I got back, I was weighing myself obsessively, even getting upset about the slight weight gain from my water levels changing when I took showers.
The first time my family really noticed, however, was when we took a holiday a month later. I was behaving obsessively about what meals I had, picking ready meals with extremely few calories and little fat when we went to the supermarket and calorie-counting to a ridiculous degree. On one day, I even refused to eat one of those ready meals and just had toast for dinner instead because it had fewer calories.
My parents’ response to this was not particularly helpful, as they frequently became angry with me, only seeing how thin I was becoming without really understanding why my mental state was so unhealthy. When they told me they thought I was anorexic, I didn’t really believe them at first- I always thought of anorexia as something girls got, not boys. They consistently tried to get me to eat more, but it would often turn into shouting matches, and I specifically remember telling them ‘I don’t see it!’ about how thin I was getting.
While I’m not sure how true it is, something I suspect is that I became so obsessive about losing weight partly because as I had lost weight, I had made more friends at sixth form, and I assumed that me being so thin was making me more attractive and likeable, so if I gained weight again people would stop liking me. This was not true at all, of course; my friends rarely ever commented on my weight, and none of them stopped being friends with me once I was recovering.
But with my mind in the state it was, I convinced myself that I had to keep being thinner to make myself attractive and likeable to my friends. It probably did not help that, because of societal stigma towards weight gain, I saw being ‘underweight’ as a goal rather than something hazardous to my health, as if I could consider myself ‘better’ than people who were heavier than me.
4. Recovery
Weight Restoration
During the late summer and autumn of 2014, I tried to make my eating habits healthier, no longer calorie counting and instead focusing on not eating fatty foods, but more or less eating whatever I wanted otherwise. But in November of that year, I relapsed into aggressively calorie counting; I would wake myself up earlier than my parents so they did not see how little I was eating for breakfast, eat chicken pieces or other small snacks for lunch & nothing else, and try to make small meals for myself for dinner like beans on toast and have them at least 12 hours before waking up the next day.
5. Relapse
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Long Tail of Recovery
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Self-discovery of Genetic Vulnerability