Woman who battled anorexia for 30 years warns of eating disorder hell
10:30am Wednesday 20th July 2011 in News By Katie Bond
Nicola Bragg's eating disorder took a dramatic toll on her health
A WOMAN who has come close to death after battling anorexia for more than 30 years is hoping her story will stop youngsters from ruining their own lives.
Mum-of-two Nicola Bragg, of Moredon, was just nine when she developed an eating disorder, having spent her childhood in and out of children’s homes where she says it was easy to get away with not eating.
Having spent the majority of her younger years living on a daily diet of boiled potatoes and litres of the caffeine-fuelled fizzy drink Dr Pepper, Nicola reached an all time low when she weighed in at just over five stone.
Years of making herself sick took its toll on her insides, and she was forced to have all her teeth removed.
She suffered a heart attack last year and is being kept alive by 139 tablets a week, or 7,224 tablets a year, to treat major depression, risk of another heart attack, low potassium levels and high blood pressure.
But, now weighing in at 7st 13 lb – her highest weight to date – Nicola is in recovery from the illness and is determined to stop others going through the same experience.
“People see anorexia as an enemy, but to get better I’ve got to make it my friend. To fight it is a bigger struggle than to deal with it,” she said.
“I want to make people aware of the dangers that anorexia does to them in later life. Wouldn’t it be better for someone to be totally honest with teenagers so they know what could happen to them?
“When people are about 15 or 16 years old, they are looking for perfection, but what is perfection? There is no such thing.”
Nicola, who has a 21-year-old daughter called Sabrina and an 18-year-old son called Tom, now has one meal a day at 7pm, which consists of pasta or salad. She says the effects of anorexia on her body have changed her lifestyle forever. “As horrible as it sounds, I have actually sat at the dinner table and cried my eyes out because there’s a dinner in front of me. It’s like a devil and an angel in your head,” she said.
“When you’re an anorexic you can feed anyone but yourself and you think about food 90 per cent of the time. But if anyone ever said to me come out for a meal, it would be the scariest thought ever. I haven’t done that for more than eight years.
“I have to joke about it because if I took it seriously I don’t think I would be where I am.
“My daughter has to help me out of the bath sometimes, or wait at the bottom of the stairs when I can’t get down any other way but on my bum. I usually have to sit on the floor instead of the sofa because it hurts my bones.
“People say ‘just eat’ but anorexia is not something that you can just switch off, it’s a lifestyle. As soon as it has a grip on you, it takes everything in you to change. It will always be there, hiding at the back of your mind until you are most vulnerable. All we need to do is take control and throw it back when it creeps out.”
Nicola said one of the biggest wake up calls came when she was hospitalised for the first time in 2002 and her doctor told her family to look for a coffin. She says she owes her life to her children.
“Hearing that was a big shock,” she said. “My children made me promise that I would do everything in my power to get better, so I put in all that I had.
“I do class my kids as my little pieces of heaven now because I have to stay on the good side of my battle to prove I can be a good mum.
“I get angry with myself a lot – I have completely damaged myself. It’s horrible now to think my children had to be home tutored because they were nervous wrecks and worried to be at school in case something happened to me.
“But I want to talk to teenagers about what I have had to face and the problems that I have now, and I am hoping that if any of them are thinking about going to desperate measures to make themselves thin they will think twice when they see me.”
Nicola has the support of the Education Committee and has collected more than 200 signatures. A Facebook group, called Support Nikki in raising anorexia awareness in schools, has more than 500 members.
Have your say on Nicola’s plans to take her story to children aged 15 and over: email kbond@swindon advertiser.co.uk.
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2:49pm Wed 20 Jul 11