University student Claire Mercer of Adelaide, Australia, is one of many people who have had problems with anorexia, a disease that causes eating disorders and self-image problems.

During the most critical moments of the disease, Claire weighed only 25 kg. Since recovering and gaining weight, she has decided to share her experience with others, posting before and now photos so that the recovery is visible so it can inspire those facing the same problem.

Today Claire is 20 years old, but admits that her weight problems started when she was just 7 years old. At the time, she even asked her friends to weigh herself in front of her to make sure she was the slimmest person in the class.

Claire says she remembers jumping around for hours to burn the calories off a piece of cake she might eat. She also had the habit of weighing herself daily, just to make sure she had not gained any weight during the day.

Problems began to appear even when she arrived in her teens and her body began to develop. "It's not that I was unhappy with my body, I was just terrified of changing and getting bigger, " she said in a statement published in the Daily Mail.

When he was 12 years old, his father was diagnosed with bowel cancer. At the time, Claire associated her father's illness with a lack of healthy eating and promised that from then on she would only eat healthy food and be extra careful with dietary issues. So the rule was: eat healthy things, but in tiny amounts, and do a lot of physical activity.

“I felt sad, scared, confused, angry, lonely and worthless. The only thing that made me feel better was seeing my weight drop, ”she confessed.

After seeing her weight drop gradually, Claire began to be hospitalized frequently. Concerned, her parents were watching with their daughter in an attempt to persuade her to eat. With her, the effect was the opposite: the more they urged her to eat, the less she wanted to eat.

To deceive her parents and her caretakers, Claire even stuffed stones in the pockets of her clothing in an attempt to show that she was gaining weight. In addition, she took laxative daily: "I felt clean, but instead I was killing myself."

Today, Claire is in the process of recovering.

Since five years went by without proper nutrition, Claire's body created an extra layer of hair to keep her warm. Thanks to the lack of vitamin, her hair fell in droves, her bones became increasingly fragile, her kidneys stopped working, and she began to have heart problems as well.

At 16, Claire began to undergo medical treatment, but the actual results were slow to appear, even because the anorexic person may again have obsessive thoughts about eating and have a kind of "relapse", so it is critical to persistence and family support.

With the help of her parents, Claire struggled to start eating a little each day. The decision came after being considered a "lost case" by a medical team. Fortunately, thanks to the assistance of a medical team and a psychologist, Claire gradually overcame the disease.

Finally, looking healthy

It's still hard for her to accept her body and maintain a balanced diet every day, but Claire believes her Instagram posts are expressively helping her. “That's why I'm telling my story. I died once and was resurrected and I have to protect other girls so they don't do the same, ”she said.

“My mission now is to show young girls, including my thousands of followers, many from the UK, that starving in the name of beauty and being thin is wrong, ” she said.

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