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.
“Part of it was being able to come to terms with having failed, because that’s what it felt like – admitting defeat – and saying … ‘This is not just me going a bit overboard on dieting. This has gone way beyond that. I need some professional help.’”
Her children were a motivation. “I remember looking at my children, particularly my girls, and thinking this is not the example I want to set for them.”
A decade on from that “very dark time”, Williment-Ross says she doesn’t think she’ll ever relapse, although it took her years to feel like she was on solid ground again. With the help of a “phenomenal” counsellor and the support of her husband, she gradually rebuilt her relationship with food and her body.
“Going from really struggling to eat any food to eating properly isn’t something you do overnight. I can’t tell you how long it took before I could eat something I hadn’t planned three days ahead.”
But slowly, over time, it became easier. “Being able to stop obsessively weighing myself every day – that was huge. It felt like it slowly got easier to do what I knew I wanted to do. Now, 10 years later, I’m back to, ‘If I’m gonna have a piece of cake, I’m gonna have a piece of cake.’”
She still regularly applies the lessons learnt in recovery about self-talk and body image. She has negative thoughts, she says, but she’s able to observe them without judgment instead of acting on them. Her new mantra: thoughts are not facts.
“I still struggle with that instinctive thought – ‘Oh, I don’t like that’ – when I look in the mirror. But now there’s another voice that says, ‘Oh, for god’s sake. You are fit, strong and healthy. Everything is working. This body has carried me through this far … this body gave me five children. I can do what I want to do.’
“I just have to remind myself of that more often than I would like to.”
