A Derry man who struggled with an eating disorder throughout his teenage years says he "likely wouldn't be here" if he hadn't found help to beat the condition.
Conor Doherty, a 27-year-old from Greysteel in Co Derry, opened up on being bullied in school for his sexuality as he described how at one point he would carry a "ziplock bag" filled with cereal and eat a handful to prevent him fainting.
Mr Doherty, speaking to Belfast Live ahead of eating disorder awareness week, described how he struggled with anorexia and weighed just five-and-a-half stone (around 35kg) as a teenage boy. He found himself so "physically weak" he would lose consciousness, he says.
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Now out the other side, thanks to help and support from his family and friends and the eating disorder charity Beat, Conor is a stable weight and enjoys cooking, food and going for meals with his family.
He now speaks out regularly on social media with a message of hope for those struggling with eating disorders, and has even written a play that was performed in Derry city titled 'A Walk in the Park' that centres on a teenage boy's struggle with an eating disorder.
He told Belfast Live his problems with food began when he was "about 13 years old" but he began to become aware of his disorder at the age of "about 14 or 15".
"I was anorexic at 13," he said. "It got gradually worse and worse as time went on and it was only around the age of 15 that I kind of became aware of it.
"I was doing things very sneakily - like I was avoiding any kind of public situations, like a meal with other people. I would have avoided like school lunches and I started kind of missing maybe two a week. And then it got to the point that I was missing three a week, four a week, and then I just wasn't eating school lunch at all. A lot of my memories of like what I look like, in my weight, from that age are very blurry but I started feeling very, very ill in school."
His school years were particularly difficult, as an openly gay child in an all-boy's school.
"I was the only openly gay boy in my year in school," he said. "I was being called like 'gay' and 'f***t' and all that kind of stuff on a daily basis in school. I was getting really badly bullied for it and that had a very big mental impact on me. I wasn't ready to accept that side of my life. And having that kind of forced on me every day, it was hard."
He added: "I was physically weak and then I was getting bullied on top of it and I just wanted to go home. I just wanted to lie down and not have to walk about that school."
Alongside those difficulties, Conor endured a number of bereavements in his family. His eating disorder continued to deteriorate throughout his teenage years.
He said: "It kind of gradually got worse and worse to the point where I was tracking my calories and, like, I was going out walking every night. I was going out running every night, I would have walked everywhere - even though I was physically frail. At my lowest weight I was about 5.5 stone."
He said he began limiting himself to as little as 600 calories per day - just a tiny fraction of the thousands of calories required to keep a teenage boy fit and healthy - and regularly weighing himself.
"I would set myself a goal and try to reach it, but like, always moving the goalposts so you can never actually score," he explained. "So I would say 'I want to get down to this' and 'I want to look this way', and if I was looking in the mirror, I'd be like 'my belly is sticking out here, my arms look a wee bit fat there'. I look back at pictures of myself now and I look so unwell - but I remember looking at myself in the mirror at that age and thinking that I was like obese.
"I thought I was huge. I started wearing clothes that were like two sizes bigger than what I actually needed. I stopped socializing. There was like a voice in my head telling me that 'you can't have that because it's this many calories'. I set these rules for myself and it felt like if I didn't follow those rules, I was going to die. That's so dramatic, but it was like a burning sensation in my body. Breaking those rules was utterly terrifying.
"I don't think I went over 6.5 stone for my entire teenage years up until the age of 20. It's not healthy, and I'm very grateful to be in a position now where I can look back and see that."
He also recounted how, having set the punishing rules for himself around calorie intake, he would feel a sense of intense panic if a situation came up where he "couldn't escape" eating a healthy meal. He gave the example of being invited to a meal with his parents and four siblings.
"I had to eat something in front of them," he said. "I would be nearly in tears. The thought of adding more calories onto the limit that I set myself - it really is almost like having a panic attack, in the strangest way. It's like a burning sensation, but also it's like a fight-or-flight mode kind of thing but in the worst possible way. Sometimes I still get it, even to this day. I just have to learn not to listen to it. It can be like a tightness on my chest, a sinking feeling in my stomach and then I might start feeling like I can't breathe."
He continued: "It got to the point where I just wasn't eating. I used to carry this, like, Ziploc bag of Cheerios around with me in case I thought I was going to faint, where I would take a couple of Cheerios and hope that would tide me over until I could sit down. My friends and family really, really noticed it, and they noticed the change in me, and my work colleagues - I worked in a chain coffee shop. I was very, very lucky that one of my friends kind of confronted me, very upfront about it, and my sister confronted me as well. They just said 'you need to talk to someone because you can't keep going the way you're going'. And I was convinced to go to see my GP, so I made a GP appointment. One of my friends came with me. They sat outside waiting for me. It was probably the scariest day of my life, if I'm being completely honest."
He said, after being helped by family and friends to gain weight by the time his appointment came around, he was denied specialist treatment from the NHS.
"My BMI was one point too high for specialist help," he said. "I couldn't get any help."
He was prescribed a medication which is commonly used to treat eating disorders. But Conor read a list of possible side effects and didn't take the medicine he was prescribed.
Eventually, thanks to encouragement from his family and friends to continued seeking support, Conor found the charity BEAT - something he believes likely saved his life.
"If I hadn't found Beat I wouldn't be here today," he said. "I'm not saying that to be dramatic."
He continued: "I am a very stable weight today. I really enjoy cooking. I enjoy food. I love going for meals with my family. Now, don't get me wrong, I have my bad days. They're always going to be there - an eating disorder is like an illness where you're never just cured from it. What you do is you learn to ignore that voice in your head - you learn how to manage it and you learn that it's not real, and those things about what you might look like aren't real, and you just learn how to put yourself forward."
On his work to help others, Conor said: "It's just about raising awareness that boys can get an eating disorder too, and I think that that's something that needs to be spoken about - and something that needs to be taken seriously by both our healthcare professionals and by the general public."
Conor shares stories and insights about his eating disorder on his TikTok, with nearly 20,000 followers, at this link
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