Hope Virgo: the woman who survived anorexia – and began Dump the Scales | Anorexia

Virgo describes a therapist she saw when she was nine, who would try to get her to draw her feelings, then get cross with her for poor draughtsmanship. By 13, she had found her own solution. “Anorexia got me. It was such an amazing coping mechanism. It would start telling me to calorie count or to ruminate over food and it numbed a lot of the stuff that I didn’t want to feel.”

Virgo was then sexually abused by an older man, which had a profound effect. “I felt like there was something categorically wrong with me, that I’d done something wrong and it was my fault. I think, after that happened, I carried a lot of that with me, and every time somebody didn’t respond in a way that I thought they were going to, it meant that I wasn’t lovable.”

The events of these years also baked in a pattern of thinking – that weight loss meant approval, and that there was nothing else intrinsic in her to approve of. Virgo is getting married this August, and describes, ruefully, how the voices still battle in her head. “There’s always part of you thinking, ‘If I did lose weight, maybe I’d look better on the day, and everyone else will have a better day.’ But that is not the truth. They’ll have a better day if I’m eating and I’m happy.”

As the illness progressed, she found allies at school and online, where there were huge communities swapping tips on avoiding food and tricking the people around you.

Yet she is keen to emphasise that it was no one thing – and certainly no one feature of modern life or the internet – that caused the anorexia. “It’s 50% down to your genetics, and I did often wonder if there was a genetic predisposition even before I saw that research.” Virgo’s grandmother suffered with disordered eating all her life, and Virgo tells an absolutely tragic story of going to visit her in hospital, just as she herself was at the end of an almost year-long stay on the eating-disorder unit. “When my grandad died, my grandmother just decided to not eat any more. She wasn’t in a psychiatric ward, she was on an old people’s ward. I think at that point, they’d probably just given up on her. I remember being really frustrated, looking at her on the bed, thinking: ‘Why can’t you just eat? I’ve done it, you should be able to do it.’”

Being in hospital herself, however, saved her life, although it was a long and extremely painful process. Very early on, she did an exercise that brought about change: a nurse asked her to draw her body on a huge piece of paper. She then asked Virgo to lie down and traced around her actual body, to compare the two images. It was an absolutely arresting, unarguable demonstration of how warped her self-image was. “From that point on, I thought: ‘I’m just going to start having a little bit of food. Start to show that I’m complying with the programme.’”

Recovery may start with the intellect, but even the mightiest mind can’t just flick a switch. The days were structured around meals, snacks and talking therapies, with all the normal aspects of teenage life excised. Patients were “constantly competing, over how much food we were eating, around people’s weights. We’d all be queueing up outside the nurse’s room where they weighed you. As soon as that person walked out of the treatment room, you could see in their face what had happened with their weight, and that was really hard. They looked distressed whatever, but they’d look more distressed if it had gone up too much – too much for them.”

A new person being admitted was also a trial. “If you were further through the programme, you would be a heavier weight than them, and that was really hard.” At meal times, people would try to squirrel away food. It created an atmosphere of intense rivalries and resentments, only occasionally broken by a moment of solidarity, not necessarily in a good way.

“There was one time when we all clubbed together and stole bread from the kitchen. It was bread that had slightly more calories than the bread we normally had, and we got rid of it. That was the only time our eating disorders interacted as a team. Most of the time, they were constantly at loggerheads with each other.”

Nonetheless, Virgo did her A-levels at hospital and was discharged in time to go to the University of Birmingham to study sociology. It was an unbelievable trial, since she emerged from hospital entirely institutionalised, with very rigid rules around both the substance and timing of all meals and snacks. If she broke these rules there was the spectre of relapse.

She kept her cereal bowl from the unit with her, so she could be certain of the amount she was eating. Close friends got used to making sure they ate at 6pm. It was already a world away from her school life, pre-hospital, when she used elaborate avoidance strategies for any group meals, but it was still a slog. “You get to a healthy weight, then you’re discharged back out into the community, on an NHS hospital food plan. You still don’t really know how to eat and how to listen to your body. It’s weird; I used to watch people eat at university and think: ‘Why can’t I eat that?’”

The university years had their own extraneous shocks – her parents divorced in her first year, her grandmother died in her third year. But she weathered these events without relapse, emerging with a degree, a solid set of friends with whom she is still very close, a few half-marathons accomplished and a running habit that was intense but under control. It wasn’t until 2016, when she was 26 and living in London, that her eating disorder returned, triggered, she believes, by the death of her other grandmother. It was a few days after this grandparent had moved into a care home, and Virgo had been to see her. “I didn’t really want to be there. I think I stayed for an hour, max, and I remember feeling really guilty for leaving, but convinced myself that I could come back the week after and it’d be fine,” she says.

Instead, she spiralled back into her old behaviours. When they became impossible to ignore, she sought psychiatric help but didn’t qualify for it, because her weight wasn’t low enough. This is, initially, what drove her to begin Dump the Scales.