‘Doctors told me I could die by 25 and it was all because of a well-meaning compliment’

When Lauren Hastings was 13 she started going to the gym. 

At first, the teenager loved learning how to use the weights and prepping healthy meals for herself and her two older sisters. But when people started complimenting Lauren on how her body looked, she wasn’t sure what to think. 

‘I don’t know if I enjoyed it or if it made me insecure,’ she admits.

It was a feeling that sparked the start of a 12-year eating disorder that would almost cost Lauren her life. 

For the next three years she ate the same foods – stacks of veg and protein – every single day, for fear of what might happen if she veered outside the strict parameters. Then, one day, she started purging.

‘I don’t know why I was sick the first time, but from that day I would throw up multiple times every single day for years,’ Lauren remembers. 

All the while, she continued to exercise obsessively, visiting her local gym before work and then another one in the evening, where she’d do several cardio classes a night. If she woke up late and missed a morning session, she would arrive at work, tell her manager she felt ill, then head straight to the gym. 

By the time Lauren was just 17 she was already stuck in a horrendous cycle of restricted eating, purging and endless exercise.

‘I would wear baggy clothes to conceal how much weight I had lost,’ she tells Metro. ‘If I trained with my sister, we would leave the gym together and she would drop me off at the bus stop for work. But every single time I would watch her leave and then walk miles to work to make sure I got my steps in. I was always on the go, even though my body was shutting down.’

Seeing what the teenager was doing to herself, concerned family and friends would try and talk to Lauren, but she would become defensive, lie to them or isolate herself. Even when she often felt dizzy or faint, she would insist she was fine. 

Looking back, Lauren, now 26, admits she has lost many years through her dazed fog of memory loss. ‘It’s like I was drunk the whole time,’ she recalls. 

It was only when her mum found evidence of a purge in the toilet and confronted Lauren that she finally sought help from her GP, and was diagnosed with bulimia and OCD.

Referred to an eating disorder clinic, she attended every week for six months – but it didn’t help. Instead, Lauren lost more weight than ever before.

‘I hated that place so much, I dreaded it,’ she remembers. ‘I went to show people that I wanted to recover, but it was a constant reminder that I had an eating disorder.

‘Before then I had never weighed myself, but when I was weighed every week, I knew I had to lose weight. The weigh-ins were motivating the eating disorder.’

Despite being warned that it was dangerous to exercise, Lauren kept going to the gym. At times, she would end up so dehydrated that she’d be put on a drip at hospital, then as soon as she was discharged, head to a fitness class.

‘No matter how I felt, physically or mentally, those fitness classes were happening. I could be seriously dizzy, faint and dehydrated; but I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ she remembers.

Meanwhile Lauren was still binging and purging. Some days she would vomit so much she would make her stomach bleed, others she would spend up to £20 a day on chocolate and biscuits. There were moments when she could eat ‘scary amounts of food’, guiltily hiding the evidence in her car.

‘If my mum brought a big box of chocolate for someone, I would eat them all, hide the wrappers and convince her that she was going insane as if she’d never bought them,’ Lauren admits. ‘I would lie through my teeth.’

Her health became so fragile that her driving licence was even taken away by the DVLA because her doctor felt that she couldn’t drive safely.  

‘That was rock bottom. I felt like my life was over,’ says Lauren. ‘I wanted to recover and needed to recover. But the bulimia was still in control.

‘I was so cold I was having four or five baths a day, turning the heating on, having electric fires in my room. I couldn’t leave my house without a hot water bottle because I was so frozen.’

Even a sunshine holiday to Tenerife with her boyfriend didn’t help, and Lauren ended up flying home early as she had spent all her money on new jumpers to keep herself warm.

It was just one of a number of relationships ruined; Lauren couldn’t let her get close to people because the eating disorder meant she couldn’t stay over with them. Looking back, she feels terrible about how many people who genuinely cared about her were kept at length because of her illness. 

Meanwhile, paranoia had also taken hold. On a shopping trip to buy new leggings with her mum, the only ones that fit Lauren were for primary aged children, but she refused to believe they were really for kids.

‘In my head I was convinced that my mum had been into the store and changed the size label  – because I thought I was a normal, healthy weight,’ she remembers. ‘My mum would take pictures to show me the size of my legs compared to my sisters’, but I thought people were editing to make them look thinner.’

After eight years without a period and her body dangerously close to shutting down, Lauren received the horrifyingly stark warning from her doctor – if she carried on, she would be dead within a year. 

‘That gave me a fright and I knew I needed help, but that night I still made myself sick,’ she recalls. 

Feeling desperate, she began looking at treatments. She’d already seen three different therapists and tried CBT and hypnotherapy, but none had helped. 

‘I knew the alternative was being sectioned on a psych ward and I just thought, there is not a chance in hell I’m going there,’ Lauren remembers.

That’s when she stumbled across the Dawn Wellness Centre and Rehab in Thailand, while searching for treatments online and spent a whole night reading about it.

Although the thought of leaving her family to travel nearly 6,000 miles alone terrified her, Lauren’s parents gave her the money to go and she booked her flight. 

The day she arrived in Thailand in January last year, Lauren told herself she wouldn’t purge. That night, she called her mum and dad and told them: “This is the first time I’ve not been sick in eight years.”

‘I had travelled halfway across the world and my parents had invested thousands of pounds. I knew I had to do it for them, as well as myself. It was like day one of the rest of my life,’ she remembers.

The rehab helped Lauren understand she was facing a disorder that was about addiction and control, not what she was putting in her body. ‘I had always believed that an eating disorder is about the food; you don’t want to eat, you want to be skinny. But I have never felt that, so I was always confused about what was going on with me,’ she explains.

Lauren was given breath work, CBT, meditation, holistic therapies and was watched around the clock for six weeks. After eight weeks she had put on a significant amount of weight and was ready to come home. 

Her battle wasn’t over though and after a relapse six months later, she returned to Thailand for four weeks for further treatment. 

Today, Lauren is back home once again and working hard on her recovery.

‘I am feeling so much better, but it is hard,’ Lauren admits. ‘I know what to do and how to look after myself. 

‘I will never be ‘cured’, but I know that If I carry on doing what I am doing, my eating disorder will stop controlling me, and I will have control over it.

‘I’m hopeful I will get to the stage where I can lead a normal, happy, healthy life.’