At the age of 12 I was anorexic, weighing just over 6st (38kg)at 5ft 2in (1.57m). A few months before, I'd had puppy-fat, but a girl in my class had called me ugly. I wanted people to think I was beautiful, so I'd decided to starve myself. One day I saw a TV programme about a girl who threw up to stay slim. Starving, I went to the kitchen, got several scones, smothered them with jam and after eating them went to the bathroom and stuck my fingers down my throat. I felt tense, conscious I was doing something forbidden, yet also blasé and numb - typical bulimic emotions to which I later became habituated. I emerged on a clean, guiltless breeze, my parents downstairs suspecting nothing.

At 13, I briefly recovered. Then, at 15, I started starving myself again, eating only once every two days - again, I was desperate to look thin and beautiful, this time to be attractive to boys.

My parents didn't notice at first. The combination of their relaxed attitude and that they both worked long hours meant I was alone in the house a lot, free to starve, eat and vomit as I wanted. Also, like all people with eating disorders, I was an expert at hiding my binges - I'd sneak out and buy junk food with my own money from my weekend job, or occasionally steal £10 from my mother's purse, so my parents never saw much of my binge food.

By the summer before I turned 16, my bulimia had become addictive and had replaced the anorexia. I binged and threw up as many as ten times a day - in between revising for exams, as soon as I got home from school - just as a way to pass time.

Within a month or two of my developing full-blown bulimia, my parents realised what I was doing. Our cleaner told Mum about laxatives in my desk drawer, and I was getting through our weekly food shop within days and was always asking Dad to drive me to buy ice-cream and cakes. And I spent hours in the bathroom. Mum would stand outside begging me to stop vomiting, but I ran the bath and pretended I was washing, or screamed “Leave me alone!” My parents took me to doctors, but I refused to get better. Eventually, afraid to alienate me further, my parents stopped speaking about it. Somehow, we all pretended this wasn't happening. I tried to hide my bulimia.

I would often gorge myself on the normal meals my mother cooked for dinner, but my parents didn't know about the biscuits and cakes that I stashed in my room, or my midnight cooking sessions in the kitchen. I'd hear other people saying, “Oh, I shouldn't have eaten that chocolate” and I'd think “Why be so stupid - just throw it up!” but sigh along with them.

I could now throw up at will, without using my fingers, just by drinking plenty of water and jumping up and down. Despite all this, I was a popular, pretty, party girl, a high achiever at school and always had boyfriends. No one looking at me would have known my secret - or that I believed I was ugly.

I binged and vomited my way through a degree at Oxbridge (hiding food in my college room and cooking in staircase kitchens), through my twenties, through two serious long-term relationships and as a successful young professional in London. I did brush my teeth often, but - perhaps deludedly - I wasn't especially worried about bad breath because what I was vomiting was not yet tainted by the stench of stomach acid.

Once I'd left home, my parents assumed that my eating disorder had disappeared and they never mentioned it. I was close to my sister and had many loving friends, but I never said a word to any of them, or sought professional help, because I didn't want to be stopped from bingeing. My secret gave me a magically stable weight and let me eat whatever I wanted. From the outside, my life could not have appeared better, but I increasingly realised that it was empty. I often excused myself from social occasions because I didn't feel a whole person; I was just a vacuous fake. My friends had no idea of the sordid reality, so our intimacy seemed meaningless.

By 2006, when a relationship had broken down and I was alone and facing 30, I knew the secrecy had to end. I wanted to be a whole person, to be satisfied like normal people, to have an honest relationship and to be a responsible mother one day. I met a new man and we fell deeply in love. I kept the bulimia from him for the first few months, but I wasn't going to let bulimia destroy our happiness. So I told him - and he was completely loving and supportive, which allowed me to be honest. Finally, I went to group and individual eating-disorder therapy. I was shocked to see that other bulimics were beautiful, intelligent, confident and successful. Like me, they wore their secret failure deep inside and no one looking at them could ever have guessed. I told my mother my secret a few months ago. Telling her was more emotional and embarrassing for me than for her. She said that she'd assumed I'd got better years before and “hadn't wanted to pry”.

The act of honesty is healing in itself and I have realised how many people really do love me - not the perfect fake me, but the real, complicated me. I am still too afraid to identify myself publicly, but just writing this is a blow against my old secrecy - and against bulimia. It's also another step forward in my recovery.

What do you think?
If you have any advice for the writer of this article, comment below or write to us at familysecrets@thetimes.co.uk.

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