When I was a teenager suffering from anorexia, I thought it was a life sentence. I genuinely believed slogans like “every woman has an eating disorder” and couldn’t imagine a future where calories didn’t make me sweat. With this in mind, you must understand that I’m boasting when I write this next sentence: in November 2024, I was diagnosed with “very high” cholesterol.

After years of restriction, I spent my 20s unable to understand why every meal shouldn’t be the maximum amount of delicious. This means that last year, I was regularly melting a packet of white chocolate buttons on my morning porridge before heading out for a white chocolate matcha with cream, followed by a cheese and egg sandwich in a brioche bun, a slice of cake, fried chicken and chips, to say nothing of the bread and butter before dinner and dessert. In short, I was smashing through my recommended daily allowance of saturated fat and loving every second of it. “Treats”, to my mind, are not something that have to be earned.

I went up a couple of dress sizes and while it would be a lie to say I did so “happily”, I didn’t really care too much about it – certainly not enough to change my eating habits or move my legs.

But what is mentally healthy isn’t always physically healthy – and perhaps I wasn’t as mentally healthy as I believed. My recovery had become almost as performative as my disorder. While I once thought I was superior for starving, I soon felt superior for never saying “no” to ice-cream and never ordering salad without a side of chips. I viewed healthy eaters with suspicion. Maybe I no longer believed that every woman had an eating disorder, but I certainly had the wrongheaded belief that every woman who worked out did.

It’s hard to shake this mindset, which is, of course, entirely defensive – hence why I just masked my high cholesterol diagnosis with the word “boasting”. The truth is that my cholesterol results scared me: my family has a long history of strokes and heart attacks, and although I don’t have a pension, I am – on the whole – into the idea of reaching old age.

I was first diagnosed with high cholesterol in 2023 when I had a health check as part of the Our Future Health scheme, and made some half-hearted attempts to swap brownies for flapjacks. I only accepted that I would really have to change my diet and start exercising after the numbers jumped to “very high” a year later.

I have now spent about half a year eating a healthier, lower saturated fat diet, and have reduced my total cholesterol to “normal” levels........

© The Guardian