00:00It very much started for me when I was like 14, 15. It happened very, very quickly.
00:07I feel like I didn't understand the world. I didn't understand what was going on.
00:12I felt like I got everything wrong. And that's, that is how I felt. I just felt wrong.
00:18Yeah.
00:18I wasn't okay. Like I was struggling with my mental health and I'd started having panic attacks.
00:23I always think like I kind of fell off a cliff edge and I went from like healthy to really,
00:29really unwell within like two months.
00:32And this anorexia came in and for me, it took me out of the world and put me in a
00:37world that I could understand.
00:39Like it, it reduced my world to thinking about exercise and food and calories.
00:45And it gave me something that I felt like I could get right.
00:48Yeah.
00:49And it was never about weight loss. It was about the way I was feeling and how I was coping
00:55or I wasn't coping.
00:57Was there ever a time that a doctor sat with you and asked, why are you doing this? What is
01:02it about food?
01:04No, it was, it was always, oh, it's an eating disorder. And I think it was assumed why.
01:10When I was going through my treatment plan as a teenager, it was very much more about the nutrition and
01:16you eat all your fruit and veg and you can,
01:19you can be nice and slim, you can eat all of this and still stay slim.
01:22But I was never going to eat everything what they were telling me to eat.
01:26So then I ended up eating nothing.
01:27Yeah.
01:28And then that's where it spiralled.
01:29I think I would much rather keep eating what I know I can eat rather than trying new foods or
01:38textures.
01:39Just, I don't like new foods because I don't know what the texture is going to be like.
01:43It becomes such a negative experience.
01:45Yeah.
01:46Like if I get overwhelmed, I'll just shut off.
01:49Yeah.
01:49There's that part of me that just shuts down.
01:51They picked up on a few things like they were sort of like, my behaviours were very ritualistic and all
01:57that kind of thing.
01:58Then when I came out of hospital, the word autism had been thrown around by a few people and I'd
02:04read some stuff online.
02:06The more I read about it, the more I felt like everything made sense.
02:11And I wrote my consultant, like a 10 page letter of all of these things that I'd noticed that I
02:16was like,
02:17and this makes sense if this is autism and this makes sense of, and then they started to sort of
02:21change things in my treatment.
02:23And we sort of, we learned what we needed to work with, which was the autism, like my nurse.
02:29He'd always let me know if there was going to be a change coming up.
02:32If I was finding something too difficult, he'd give me more time.
02:36Equally, if I felt I could do something faster, then we'd do it faster.
02:40And it's just having a bit more information.
02:42Yeah.
02:42A bit more of a plan in place.
02:44A day with structure.
02:45I always think that's the best way.
02:47You see him in a really positive place.
02:51Yeah.
02:51So right now, I'm looking at returning to uni in September as a full-time student.
02:56Oh, congratulations.
02:57I've got a job.
02:58Um, I'm getting, I'm getting into a better place for my physical health.
03:03I'm kind of, my, I'm managing food a lot better than I was.
03:09And again, like, I'm not managing a huge variety of food, but I'm managing enough.
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