COVER STAR

Hope Virgo, 28, from south west London, was forced to put her life on hold for years while in the grips of anorexia. Now at a stage of ongoing recovery, she is using her experience and understanding to help others. What’s more, after years of running as a secretive and obsessive route to extreme weight loss, she has rebuilt her relationship with exercise, now running for the love of it – and to celebrate her new-found mental and physical strength.

But Hope’s road to recovery hasn’t been easy. It has taken immense mental strength to change the deeply rooted beliefs and behavioural patterns that anorexia instils which, in Hope’s case, began around the age of 12, following sexual abuse by a family friend that went on for 10 months.

“Throughout my whole childhood, I had real problems expressing any sort of emotion,” she remembers. “And then during that whole period [of assault] I felt really guilty. I didn’t know who to talk to about it, so I just bottled everything up.

Over the next year, I gradually started to skip meals and exercise a lot more. For me, the anorexic voice in my head gave me this value reassurance – it helped me to switch off from everything that was going on around me, which is what I wanted to do.”