Ali* initially came to therapy for disordered eating. She was a young and diffident woman. She described recurrent cycles of restricted eating followed by attempts to exercise it away. We used cognitive behavioural therapy for eating disorders to unpick her “food rules” – the underlying beliefs which can drive eating disorders, such as “the less I eat the better” or “carbs are bad”.

As we worked on understanding and shifting her beliefs and behaviours around food, we noticed that most of her assumptions around eating, shape and weight coincided with the start of her relationship with her ex-partner. She told me he was a “gym junkie” and spent hours working out and encouraged her to do the same. “He got angry if I ate carbs,” she said, “and created a couples meal plan for us so I could shred and look hot when we were out together.”

Slowly, she spoke of other forms of control: encouraging her to dress in a “sexier” manner than she felt comfortable with, jealousy if he saw her talking to another man, watching her bank transactions to see where she was going, and insisting on going to all her social events so he could get to know her friends. “But he’d always start an argument, or would say he didn’t like them,” she told me. “And then I had to stop seeing them to prove my loyalty to him.” He used her........

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