A YOUNG woman who has defeated the eating disorder which threatened to destroy her life is now helping others to fight the devastating condition.
Natasha Devon is returning to the Herts and Essex High School, where she was once a pupil, on Wednesday (September 16) to talk to students about the bulimia nervosa which gripped her when she was 18.
Now 28, the Rye Street resident wants to stop other vulnerable teens falling victim to eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
She now works with Mark Newey, the boss of Winning Minds in Saffron Walden, who helped her walk away from the binge-eating and vomiting which were blighting her teens.
Natasha now works with him at his practice and is an ambassador for Body Gossip, a national campaign founded by former schoolmate Ruth Rogers, in which the stories of ordinary people and their relationships with their bodies are performed by celebrities such as Natalie Cassidy, Nikki Grahame, Chloe Marshall, the size 16 Miss UK contestant, Shobna Gulati and Anne Diamond.
The next performance is in Edinburgh. There have already been two in Kings Cross and now the campaign is gathering momentum after mentions in magazines Closer and Heat and on TV with spots on GMTV and Loose Women.
Natasha also runs a telephone helpline every Monday night between 7pm and 9pm to offer confidential advice and support.
She said: “When I was 18 it one day occurred to me to make myself vomit. At the time I didn’t think it was a big deal and I firmly believed it was a one-off.
“It took just a couple of days for bulimia nervosa to grasp me firmly in its clutches and, years later, the desire to binge and purge consumed my every waking thought.
“Make no mistake, bulimia nervosa is not a glamorous disease. You acclimatise yourself to stuff that would have disgusted you before – plunging your hand into a sink full of sick to unblock it, the stink that’s an inevitable consequence of taking 30 laxatives a day, toilet water jumping up and splashing you in the face... these vile things become your everyday life.”
Now a part-time model for companies which appreciate curves – such as Hockerill’s Bodice and Bustle bridal boutique – Natasha is frank about the physical ravages of bulimia.
“My teeth wore away from acid erosion. I’d be out with friends or at work and suddenly have a mouthful of crumbled tooth enamel. I’d regularly have tears in my stomach lining.
“The pain of attempting to digest food when there’s a hole in your stomach is indescribable, but I couldn’t stop – the compulsion to binge was too strong.
“I’d get big, fleshy holes in the roof of my mouth, too, and irritating ulcers. I’d scratch the back of my throat so much with my fingernails or a toothbrush or a pen that sometimes I’d vomit blood, and I always, always had a sore throat, not to mention swollen glands that gave me the appearance of a bullfrog.
“Ironically, when you consider that most people initially use bulimia as a weight loss tool, it completely ravages your looks.”
There was also a huge emotional toll.
“I was obsessed with how I looked in a way that I’d never been before. I was completely crippled by insecurity, convinced everyone was staring at me. Some days I couldn’t even leave my flat and the only explanation I could give was that I felt too hideous.”
She confessed: “Being malnourished and exhausted from the effort of making myself ill made me depressed. I used to lie on my bathroom floor struggling to breathe and having heart palpitations [another side-effect of forcing yourself to vomit], thinking of ways I could kill myself, just to put an end to this subtle daily misery that was my dirty secret.
“I became moody and withdrawn and I’d snap at my friends and family and say things I didn’t mean. I had dramatic mood swings. My mum told me during this time she was actually frightened because she just didn’t know what I would do or say next.
“Quite often I’d fall asleep at my desk at work and found it almost impossible to concentrate. I couldn’t accept responsibility for my own behaviour and had to deal with the constant shame of making a fool of myself or upsetting someone I cared about.”
In May 2008 she consulted Mark Newey. He uses a unique blend of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), behavioural therapy and hypnotherapy to help people beat stress, depression, addiction, anger, phobias and other personal issues.
Natasha said: “He taught me in easy-to-understand terms how my brain works, why I couldn’t free myself of my eating disorder with my conscious mind alone, even though I so desperately wanted to, and the science behind hypnotherapy. It was a revelation.”
Her attempts to get conventional medical help had failed when her GP told her that as she was not underweight, she did not have an eating disorder – “despite the fact that I was by this time making myself vomit up to eight times every day, exercising compulsively and taking hundreds of laxatives”.
She said: “I persisted with the NHS, who eventually prescribed a high dosage of antidepressants. Of course, these did absolutely nothing to help. I knew with an absolute certainty that I had to change my life – I just didn’t, at that time, know how.”
Just two sessions with Mark were enough to change her life forever.
Natasha said: “I was able to put my 10-year history of bulimia behind me forever. One morning I just woke up and thought ‘Why would I do that to myself?’
“Making myself ill seemed like such an irrational and alien behaviour to me. I have been free from bulimia since August 2008.”
To find out more about Winning Minds, go to www.winningminds.co.uk.
Mark Newey will be running NLP workshops in late September. To learn more about Body Gossip, visit www.bodygossip.org.