Adding a post as I thought it was strange there were no posts.

Just exploring groups on Spacehey, and this one caught me eye.

I don't have a serious eating disorder - am just a very fussy / picky eater.

However, I've met two people with an eating disorder.

Person one, I met by the River Thames, in 2015, on my way to a Bloom Twins gig. She and I became friends and stayed in touch via phone calls. She had been in a controlling relationship previously, and her eating disorder, although she didn't realise it at the time, was basically her escape route out of that situation. She ended up hospitalised - which was shocking for me to hear about. Am not sure her eating disorder had got to a serious medically-problematical state, it was more just the powers-that-be kidnapping her, as a catalyst to allow for new healthier behaviour, or as a preventative measure to stop the situation getting worse, which was very shocking for me to hear about - that the government can just forcibly detain people in hospital, =S.

Anyway, initially she missed her partner, but then was like - why am I making such a fuss over them? And she got over them, got out of there, and was pretty much better on release. She had a bunch of friends she made in the hospital, and they all had eating disorders too. This was kinda funny to hear of. I remember she told me she had one of her friends visit a few years later and she caught them throwing up in her bathroom by sticking fingers down their throat - and she was like - nah - you're not doing that in my house - and came down pretty badly on her friend for getting into old habits. So it was clear a corner was turned for her at least. The odd thing was, she was forcibly hospitalised again later as I'll now explain...

...She had used the tinder app when drunk to hook up with a Latvian gym enthusiast with a six pack, and since she'd never once got pregnant in her past relationships, didn't take precautions, and ended up pregnant. 'Cos the guy was a one night stand, she did a really good job getting through pregnancy on her own - and of course chatting to me on the phone each night, and later when she had her daughter, she initially found being a single parent overwhelming, and that's when they took her into hospital again, and insisted she took a break - so they arranged for her to have her parents look after her daughter on weekends, so she could still have a life - or at least two days a week to recover and just be a young adult again and see her friends, etc. It's kinda crazy her parents never offered to help like that anyway. It was good that after the second hospital intervention she had a better work-life balance.

My trouble is I love bones - wrist bones, shoulder blades, ribs, wrist balls, and in particular protruding ankle bones - and it almost seems like everytime I meet someone really skinny, they always turn out to have a health problem, which is really a shame, ^_^. I assume I like skinny people because I am mixed race, and half asian, and asians tend to be far more petite and skinny than your average Brit (am based in Britain).

So, the second person I met, was when I had to change trains mid-journey in 2016. As my train pulled up to the station - I could not believe what I was seeing out of the train window. I was witnessing the thinnest legs I'd ever seen in my life. There was a girl standing on a platform in the distance, wearing a big thick coat, and out of the bottom of this coat, came two long thin bare legs - and because the jacket was so big and thick, they looked even thinner than they might otherwise. I got my stuff together, and rushed over to the platform to see if this person was actually real - or if my need for glasses meant I simply hadn't focussed correctly (when you need glasses, everyone looks beautiful!) and I went over to see them, and was able to strike up a conversation, as the girl waited for her train. She had just met up with her friend from....yep...you guessed it....the time they were in the hospital together for their eating disorders, XD. Good grief! Anyway, we had a pleasant chat, and I had hoped we would stay in touch, but when I went to write to her on Facebook afterwards, she wasn't that talkative, and unlike with the first person, no friendship emerged, because she knew I fancied her, and she didn't have any feelings for me.

Nonetheless, I was able to follow her posts, and it was encouraging to see how she did - she got a job, and learned to drive, and life post-hospital seemed good. Then I actually learned what had happened as the #metoo movement picked up and people were posting openly about their experiences with problematic men, O_O.... a family member had abused her when young, -_-...and this had been part of what triggered the eating disorder. To make matters worse, because it was a family member, not all of her family had believed her, and the family had sort of split, each taking different sides. That must have been awful to go through!

I only know all this because they opened up and posted a public facebook post about it, but before that post, I didn't know anything, and only gathered they had issues from a student film they appeared in, that talked about self hate.

That film can be found on youtube here: