“When I first started making myself sick, I didn’t know what the word bulimia meant. It all began at my secondary school when I was bullied. I was a bit geeky and was teased for it, but as time went on it got worse and took a homophobic turn.

I was quite effeminate in my appearance, and when my voice broke it was squeaky, which didn’t help. I was quite the gay stereotype, even though at the time I thought it was a swear word. I was called names like ‘batty boy’ and ‘puffter’ on a regular basis.

As the bullying grew worse and more kids joined in, I would run out of lessons to escape the abuse. I hid in the boy’s toilets where I knew I wouldn’t be found. There I would comfort eat to ease the tension and anxiety that had built up inside me throughout the day. Over time, it became a habit and evolved into me making myself sick. I’d go home and binge on anything I could find and make myself throw up there too. The release made me feel better and became my way of coping with the bullying. I only realised it was a problem through reading an Agony Aunt’s column in my mum’s magazine. I’d heard of eating disorders, but thought it was just starving yourself. I didn’t think men could have eating disorders, either. For a while, I was in denial about it. I thought: ‘I’m a boy. There’s no way I am bulimic.’ It became a way to punish myself, because I began to believe that I deserved the bullying.

It was never about weight or even body image for me, only about emotional stress. I was always underweight and very thin. As a teenager, I weighed about 6 and a half stone.

I only had one friend in high school, but even he bullied me when the others were around. A lot of my classmates didn’t want to associate with me in case they got picked on too. I think my mum knew that I was depressed, but she was wrapped up in her own problems, so there was no-one I could talk to.

The only time the school did anything about it was when I walked out the day after the bullying got too much. A teacher asked me to make a list of all the people who were attacking me, and she was shocked when it run up to about 40 kids.