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Anorexia is glamourised so much in the media. It’s always a pretty thin white girl who goes to treatment and gets better, and always based on stereotypes. Here’s what it’s actually like to live with: 
To put it bluntly: it sucks. Firstly, it gives you a buzz. The hunger high and euphoria at losing weight are incomparable, but they are so short lived. You’ll think you’re in control, but you’re not. You’ve no control at all.
Soon you start to feel exhausted. You have no energy and you sleep all the time. You can barely keep your eyes open or function in the day. But that won’t last either. At some point, as you eat less and lose more weight, the opposite will happen.
You’ll be a chronic insomniac. You’ll fall into a broken sleep eventually, but all night you’ll be dreaming of food and waking up in a panic. You body doesn’t want you to sleep, because if you’re asleep you can’t eat. So it fights to keep you awake.
The media often portrays people with anorexia as being disinterested in food. This couldn’t be more wrong. You’ll be so obsessed with it it takes up every waking moment of your day. You’ll think about it constantly. You’ll talk about it to everyone who will listen.
Maybe you’ll hoard it in your house, or maybe you’ll avoid it like the plague. You’ll either stare at other people while they eat, or leave the room as quickly as possible to avoid having to see or hear it.
You’ll watch cooking shows and read recipes and stare at videos and photos of food. You might watch videos of other people eating, just to try and imagine how it feels and what it tastes like.
You will alienate people around you. You’re no fun anymore, because you can’t to anything centred around food and you don’t have the energy or motivation to socialise. Your routines are too rigid to do anything spontaneous and people end up getting bored of you.
You’ll be anxious every second of the day, and every time you wake up in the night. Everything you eat you’ll feel guilty for. Your brain is a calculator that you can’t turn off, constantly monitoring calorie input and output, counting kilograms and steps.
You might also use compensatory behaviours. Maybe you exercise until your whole body hurts. Maybe you purge in different ways to make yourself feel empty, but you still never feel empty enough.
Sometimes the hunger might get too much, and you end up bingeing, after which you feel so terrible you honestly want to stop existing. The eating disorder thoughts become even louder than you thought possible.
Eventually your body starts struggling. If you have periods, they might stop. Maybe your electrolytes are unstable and your bones are weak. If this doesn’t happen to you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t sick. It just means you’re lucky.
You start viewing everything as a silent competition to see who eats the least, who is the thinnest, who moves the most. You feel a quiet superiority when you see other people eating when you aren’t, and you feel angry and jealous of people who aren’t eating when you are.
Your hair will start falling out, but you’ll grow a layer of it all over your body. Your skin will be dry, your nails will break. Sitting down and laying in bed will be painful on the bony parts of your body. You’ll never be comfortable and you’ll always be cold.
Nothing will be fun anymore. You won’t enjoy anything you used to. Yes, maybe you’ve numbed all the bad feelings. But you’ve numbed all the good ones too.
You’ll realise that you’re upsetting everyone around you, and you’ll feel selfish and horrible and guilty. You’ll start to dislike yourself even more than you already did.
And that’s before even starting recovery. Refeeding pains and the associated risks are no joke. Having to learn to live in a body that doesn’t feel like your own is painful, but you have to keep eating anyway, despite the mental and physical torture.
Eventually, if you stick with it long enough, some bright spots will appear. You’ll laugh at something on the telly or be able to sit through a film. You’ll be able to sleep through the night and your personality will return.
You’ll be able to socialise again and spend time with the people you love. They will actually want to be around you now that you’re not scrutinising everything they put in their mouths and demanding to hear what they put on their grocery list.
It’s a long and painful process, and it is nothing like you see in the movies. There’s nothing glamorous about anorexia. It’s lonely, it’s painful and it can be deadly. But recovery is possible and life is so much better on the other side.
