Originally published by The Spinoff . A new study has found the pandemic brought a significant increase in eating disorders throughout Aotearoa . Alex Casey talks to those who experienced it first hand.
This article mentions mental health and eating disorders, please take care. It was Te Uru’s dad who first raised the alarm with her GP. The teenager was in Year 11 in 2020, had become fixated on “good” and “bad” foods , and convinced herself she couldn’t keep food down, and this frequently resulted in vomiting after eating.
She wasn’t able to concentrate at work or school, and had lost a significant amount of weight. “I was trying my best to live a normal life,” she says. “But not very successfully.
” When she went to that first doctor visit with her dad, Te Uru felt as if she hadn’t been properly heard. “They got me alone and asked me about what I had been experiencing, and they said it was all just anxiety around food rather than an eating disorder,” she says. “I ran on that belief that there was nothing wrong with me for a long time into my eating disorder, so that I didn’t have to take the steps necessary to get better.
”.
