'I feel too fat to fit through a doorway'

Anorexics make an effort to ‘squeeze’ through doorways even when they don’t have to. Young women with the eating disorder turned side-on to get though a gap when it was 40% wider than their shoulders. In contrast, healthy women only started to swivel when the space was much narrower.

Anorexia accounts for around one in ten of the 1.6million cases of eating disorders in the UK, is much more common in females than males and usually develops in adolescence. Sufferers try to stay as thin as possible by drastically cutting back on food and undertaking extreme exercise. Long-term, it can cause health problems from brittle bones to life-threatening heart damage.

It appears that for those with anorexia nervosa, experience their body as fat goes beyond thinking and perceiving themselves in such a way, it is even reflected in how they move around the world.

It is recently concluded that among teenage girls, eating disorders are now second only to depression as the most common new mental health problem they will be diagnosed with. However, boys are not exempt, with increasing numbers being diagnosed, including some as young as ten.

With the young under increasing pressure to ‘be perfect and look perfect’, the problem is now so severe it threatens the mental health of an entire generation.