“Leaving school at 16 was a conscious decision I made in respect of a blossoming football career, which I had visions of escalating to professional levels and aspired to be the best I could in that field.

This meant taking on full time employment due to age and not being eligible for a fully fledged contract. Roof Tiling was a side project for me, and was always the way I was told to approach a football career. ‘Get yourself a trade son’, the famous words of my father, and right he was. As time passed and football progressed, I became obsessed with being the best in whatever I did. Being the fastest, running the furthest, jumping the highest, always seeking that extra 5% over the masses. This made me very aware of everything I was doing, and from time to time made me uncomfortable.

In June 2006, I badly injured my wrist and resulted in me being dropped from a list of potential professionally contracted players. Devastated, I vowed to turn it around. Always being the fittest meant me having to seek other modes of exercise to maintain this outstanding persona I had set myself.  I would cycle 20-30 miles as a feasible mode of exercise, followed by 6-7 mile runs, and over time, this meant a sacrifice to social activities, which at the time seemed the correct decision to make. As the months passed, I began playing at a fair local level and made positive progress, but ‘off the field’ things never righted themselves.

This began with cutting out vital components of my diet. Carbohydrates and Fats where first to go, and anything I found with ‘higher’ than normal calorific value, was binned. From this point, the illness went from strength to strength, and restricting became the norm. I would eat small meals and religiously NOT snack in between. This wasn’t good enough, I had to do more, so I cut out a meal, and lunch was the first to go. With this I found myself forever wanting to ‘better’ myself, and if it meant going 24 hours without food, that was the sacrifice that had to be made.