Woman’s hard road to recovery after ‘dark time’ with eating disorder
“Being able to stop obsessively weighing myself was huge," Judy Williment-Ross says. Photo / Guy Frederick
Judy Williment-Ross was 43 when things, in her words, “spiralled out of control”. She was, she thinks now, heading towards perimenopause, and experiencing a time of transition in other ways too. The youngest of her five children had just started school and she faced the prospect of heading back into the workforce.
“I thought the whole rest of my life is stretching out in front of me. I’ve got 20 good years, at least, of work. What am I going to do? What am I good for? I had confidence issues. And as I often did, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m feeling a bit overweight. I should lose a bit of weight.’”
Williment-Ross had always been susceptible, she says, to the idea that her worth as a person was tied to her body size. “I’ve had terrible body-image issues all my life – since I was a child. That underlying thought that you should be slim, and if you’re not, you should be working towards it, I very much internalised. It was a way I would judge my self-worth. I should be a certain size, and if I’m not, then I’m not doing my best as a person.”
Though she’d previously lost weight easily and felt better for it, this time was different. What started as dieting accelerated to severely restricting her eating. Disguising the fact took “a huge amount of time and energy”. She would obsessively weigh herself, resolving to eat less that day than she had the day before. She avoided social gatherings – “any situation that involved eating, really” – at all costs.
“I found it incredibly stressful. I couldn’t possibly have gone out for dinner with friends. My family gets together once a month for a coffee morning and everybody brings something to share. I would be kind of moving around with my coffee, so that nobody noticed I wasn’t eating anything.”
Comments on Williment-Ross’s rapid weight loss were batted away. “I had my standard response: I’d just been feeling I should be a bit healthier … and I’d just absolutely enthuse about how great I felt and how everything was wonderful. But what I was trying to do was eat as little as possible.”
By the time she admitted she needed help, she was too weak to go running, an activity she had enjoyed.
“I was aware that this was getting out of control and I was not handling things well, and I thought, ‘No, I can fix this. I’m old enough and smart enough, I know what’s going on. I can fix it.’
“But of course, I couldn’t.”
She asked her husband – who was well aware something was wrong – to go with her to the doctor. She says she found seeking treatment incredibly difficult.