Fitness app nearly killed me in anorexia battle, says Doncaster writer Lisa Fouweather

What I didn't know at the time, however, was that my obsession with this app, the regimented documenting of every grain of food that entered my body and every step I walked(/ran/forced myself to jog on the spot in my bedroom at 11pm because my step count 'wasn't high enough') would nearly kill me.

The app?

My Fitness Pal.

I would delete the app every week at my doctor's appointment, only to redownload it again as soon as I got home.

I was hooked, unable to let go of that which was killing me.

To make it even easier to hit self-destruct, there was even the option to insert your 'goal weight', and the app would be so kind as to tell you how much (little) you had to eat every day to reach that goal.

Every week my goal would be reduced.

Every week I would push myself one step closer to the edge.

'Plug in your age, sex, height, and weight, along with how much weight you’d like to lose and how fast, and in less than a second you can get a personalised recommendation of exactly how much to eat to achieve your goals.

All you have to do is obsessively count every bite of food (does toothpaste have calories in it?) and you can pick your weight as easily as you pick out your underwear!

Calories, steps, macros, it was all tracked. I would meticulously check the labels of everything and diligently insert the details on thel app, which would then show me the numbers on a pie chart (oh the irony), colour-coded, informing me of what would be added to my 'fear food' list next.

What had always been a 'safe' food, fruit, became something that I feared - 'too much sugar' and sugar = unhealthy.

This is the problem (one of the many problems) with calorie-tracking apps such as the likes of My Fitness Pal.

There is no distinguishing between types of sugar or types of fat.

Too black and white (well, red, yellow, or green, but that doesn't have the same ring to it, does it really?), with no comprehension of what labelling food as 'bad' can do to people.

Having both anorexia and autism, anorexia fed off (pardon the pun) my autism, whereby calorie counting became my hyper-fixation to the extent that even when we were visiting my grandad in intensive care, I would spend upwards of an hour in the hospital shop, scrutinising the label of every cereal bar to get the 'healthiest' option.

It wasn't as simple as getting the lowest calorie bar anymore, because if it was higher in sugar than a slightly higher calorie bar that, in my mind, was even worse.

Choosing what to eat became a tactical mission, a job in itself, with the knowledge that if I chose the 'wrong' option, I would feel an unwavering sense of guilt for the foreseeable.

I might have been wasting my life with my, to the outsider, ridiculous preoccupation with food, I might have been shortening my life with it even, but nothing to me was worse than that sense of guilt I'd feel after making the 'wrong' choice.

It feels like a game. These apps encourage you to succeed.

And when you don't ['succeed']?

'You're a failure.'

I can remember being at Pret a Manger with my mum once and ordering a tuna nicoise salad.

I'd spent hours the previous night looking up the menu and I knew that this was the lowest calorie lunch option on the menu.

It came with a sachet of sauce on the side which I poured on the salad under my mum's watchful eyes, only to realise halfway through that the calorie content didn't include the sauce, it was for the salad only.

With no way of knowing how many calories I'd consumed, it sent me spiraling.

So guilty did I feel after that that I can still remember it now, almost seven years on, and feel the sense of shame I felt.

To anyone who thinks that eating disorders are about 'vanity', my hope is that they will come across these words.

It was never about vanity.

I was ill.

So ill that on my daily walk at lunchtime when I was in college, when I'd walk to a park where I would throw my lunch in the bin and down two litres of water to suppress my hunger, I would hold my breath as I passed the fish and chip shop, genuinely believing (and vehemently fearing) that inhaling the smell would mean inhaling a calorie.

I was that ill.

I wish it was about vanity. I wish that the extent of anorexia was a lifted t-shirt in front of a mirror (that's how it started) and not a section (that's how it ended) but unfortunately it wasn't.

Anorexia was nearly a death sentence.

To a lot of people, anorexia IS a death sentence.

Without treatment, up to 20% of eating disorder cases result in death, with one in five of these deaths being a result of suicide.

Why? Because when it's all happening in your head, the sense of shame, the guilt, seemingly inescapable, the constant strain that it puts on your brain is unavoidable and something has to give.

I was one of the lucky ones, although 'lucky' wasn't the word I would've used at the time upon being carted off to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, but I am still here today to tell my story and for that, I was SO lucky.

In denial that I had an eating disorder, let alone that I needed to be admitted to the hospital for it, I refused to accept help.

Fortunately for me (again, not something I thought at the time but looking back I was so fortunate) people could see that I needed help, desperately, and the choice to be admitted to the hospital was taken out of my hands when, on the 11 July 2018, aged just 16, I was sectioned.

I would go on to spend a total of seven months in the hospital, learning more about life in the seven months that I would spend between those four walls than I learned in my previous seventeen years on earth.

Why was I so hellbent on killing myself? For what? Why couldn't I see that I was killing myself?

Introspection replacing my longing for self-destruction, I swapped my obsession with counting calories for noticing patterns, trying to make sense of things in my head.

The overarching thing that I learned? That if I hadn't been sectioned, then I would, without a doubt, be dead, screenshots of My Fitness Pal being blown up on a big screen at an inquest, 'it's just so sad', they would've all said.

It's not just 'sad', it's inconsolable. It's consolable that companies can get away with so blatantly profiting off apps that are killing young people.

Apps like My Fitness Pal, when questioned, retort that they are 'not designed for people with eating disorders', but to that answer, I would argue, 'so why aren't there better-safeguarding measures in

place?'

Why, despite inserting a weight that was half of what was healthy for my height did it still tell me how many calories I should consume to get my weight even lower?

Why is it unavoidable?

Even if we don't download a calorie tracking app, every time we go out for a meal we now have to be confronted with the calories of everything plastered all over the menu, a constant reminder of:

- Increasing step counts

- Decreasing food intake

- Miles and macros

- Kilometres and calories

- Life and...death.

One in five.

Just remember that figure.

One in five.