THE Daily Star’s newest Page 3 girl has revealed how she beat an eating disorder which left her weighing just 6st.
Linda Lusardi opens up about her Page 3 career
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Looking at Beth Cowan now, you would never believe that she was once in the grip of an illness. She was addicted to exercise and ate just one apple a day!
But the beauty, from Chester-leStreet, Co Durham, conquered her demons and is now regaining her confidence thanks to modelling.
Beth, 22 – who now weighs a healthy 9st 7lb – says: “Modelling has helped with my confidence, I love it.
“I’ve put on weight and I love the people I work with. And when I look at my pictures, I’m finally happy with what I see.”
Beth’s eating disorder started when she was 15. There were problems at home and her mum Barbara, who she was very close to, had bad experiences with partners which affected Beth.
(Image: JEANY SAVAGE )
“Bad things kept happening,” she says. “There was a lot of stress with my family.
“I’m a perfectionist, I always try to do my best and I’m very hard on myself. Eating was control for me.
“I started making myself sick, shoving my fingers down my throat and then a toothbrush when my fingers weren’t enough.
“Then I started cutting out meals one by one. First I wouldn’t have tea. Then I wouldn’t have dinner at school. Then I started skipping breakfast.
“I lost a lot of weight quickly and went down to 6st. I was surviving on just one apple a day.”
Beth’s eating disorder deepened when she became hooked on going to the gym.
“I qualified as a fitness instructor when I was 16 and then as a personal trainer,” she explains.
“But I got into a really bad place with the gym.
“I felt I had to go on the treadmill for an hour every day and burn 1,000 calories or I couldn’t stop.
“It took over my life – all I thought about was food and the need to go to the gym.
“I just couldn’t stop, it was my number one priority above everything else, family, friends, anything.”
In the grip of her addiction, Beth searched the internet for more ways to lose weight and stumbled across dangerous pro-anorexia sites. She says:
“They have the rules telling you what you can’t do and can’t eat – it’s like a voice in your head all the time.”
Even at her thinnest, Beth still thought she was fat when she looked in the mirror.
She explains: “I couldn’t see I had anything wrong with me. Now I think how did I let that happen? Why couldn’t I see I was ill?”
(Image: JEANY SAVAGE )
Beth’s slow road to recovery began when a doctor sent her for a bone scan, suspecting she didn’t have enough calcium in her diet.
She says: “It was a gradual process. When I went for the scan and looked at the old people around me, I realised something was wrong. I was only a teenager.
“I was referred to the eating disorders team but they said I was too mentally ill for them to help – I had to get better mentally first.
“I was told if I continued like that, I wouldn’t be able to have children.
“That’s when I realised I had to change. Not being able to have kids, just to be thin? It wasn’t worth it. I was wasting my life.
“If I carried on like this, I was going to end up killing myself.
“I realised I needed help – there was something wrong in my head.”
Beth started seeing a mental health professional who gradually helped her work out that she spent all her time and energy worrying about other people and didn’t take enough care of herself.
She started to eat relatively normally again – though she knows she will probably never fully recover.
“I don’t think it will ever leave me,” she says.
(Image: JEANY SAVAGE )
“A broken arm heals but with something like this, I don’t think you ever truly heal.
“I still struggle to eat three meals a day but I am getting there. I really like modelling, so that helps.”
Beth is also a full-time carer for her mum, who suffers with fibromyalgia – a long-term pain condition – and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Beth says: “It’s a full-time job and it’s a struggle because she’s on lots of morphine.”
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But both Beth and her mum Barbara have been boosted by her modelling career, which will see the brunette make her Page 3 debut next week.
“My mum always wanted to be a model so she loves that I’m doing it,” says Beth.
“I’m doing it for me and her.”
Mum shares shocking photos of her anorexic daughter, 19, in a desperate attempt to raise money for life-saving treatment
Sarah Weddle wants to raise awareness about the illness her daughter Chloe has been battling for the past four years
A MUM has shared shocking photos of her anorexic daughter in a bid to raise enough money on GoFundMe to give her life-saving psychiatric treatment.
Tragically, Sarah Weddle, 40, believes her daughter Chloe’s condition has become so severe that attending a private health clinic is their last hope.
As well as raising funds, the distraught mum also wants to raise awareness of this increasingly common condition. She worries NHS eating disorder units lack enough money to treat severe cases of the illness.
Sarah hopes that by sharing her 19-year-old daughter’s story, she will be able to help other parents spot telltale signs of the disorder.
Chloe, who has dreams of going to university to study Marine Biology, has battled her anorexia nervosa for the past four years and it’s believed to have been brought on by her parent’s divorce.
“Chloe was always self-conscious about her weight when she was young, but it wasn’t until she was almost 16 when I started to notice her skipping meals or saying she had ate at a friends house,” Sarah told The Sun Online.
“She took the breakdown of mine and her dad’s marriage really hard and I’ve been told since that a trauma can trigger anorexia.
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“They can’t control what’s going on around them, but they can control what they eat. It’s like a safety net, a comfort thing.”
When Sarah started noticing her daughter’s condition, she immediately tried to get help from doctors.
“Over the past four years Chloe has been an inpatient in three different eating disorder units in Scotland, Darlington and the last one at the Richardson Unit in Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary Hospital where she spent five months,” explains Sarah.
But each of these have failed and Sarah believes this is because the NHS simply doesn’t have the funding to treat severe cases of eating disorders.
“The problem is that there is not enough funding on the NHS to treat anorexia. They concentrate on ‘re-feeding’ and weight restoration, they don’t receive enough for intense therapy sessions,” says Sarah.
“It upsets her and myself, because she really doesn’t want to be this way. She wants to live a normal life, go out with friends and go to university to study Marine Biology. But the without the correct treatment, I can’t see that ever happening.”
Now, in a last ditch attempt to help, Sarah has turned to crowdfunding to try and raise money so Chloe can attend a private health clinic which will offer her the essential treatment she needs.
“Private clinics concentrate on Holistic Therapy as well as a nutritional dietary plan and regular monitoring of weight, bloods etc,” Sarah explains.
“This is what I feel Chloe desperately needs. And I am terrified I’m going to lose her. People die of anorexia all of the time, it has the highest rate of mortality than any other mental illness.”
Although some people may believe that anorexia is a vanity issue, Sarah is keen to stress that this isn’t the case, explaining that “it’s a very serious and dangerous mental illness, which can kill.”
As well as raising money for Chloe’s treatment, Sarah wants to raise awareness of the disorder and has offered some words of advice for other parents.
“To other parents who suspect their child may have an eating disorder, I would say, don’t just go off weight, weight loss is the side effects of anorexia, it IS NOT the cause.
“If they find their child talking unhealthily about dieting or exercise, refusing meals, or find them looking at pro-Ana websites, then please take them to their GP.
“If you have no luck there (as I didn’t) speak to a school nurse, who can refer you to the right services.
“Don’t waste time, don’t brush it off as a phase, the longer it goes on, the harder it is and before you know it your child is in the full grips of a very deadly illness.”
Sarah has set up a GoFundMe page, called Help Save Chloe, where people can donate to her cause and for more information the family have also set up
