The soaring rise of eating disorders: ‘Once I started restricting, I couldn’t stop.’

BEAT estimate that 3.5 million people in the UK suffer from an eating disorder, around one in 20 people (Picture: Getty)

It was while Kate Cronin was at university that she discovered she could track her eating habits on an app.

What went into her food wasn’t something she had actively thought about before, but watching her new housemates carefully curate meals, taking photos and entering macros on their mobiles, she felt a self-consciousness that wasn’t there before.

‘It was the first time I heard the words “calorie deficit”‘, Kate tells Metro.

Soon following suit, she started small; cutting back on eating and ensuring she walked 10,000 steps a day. But things quickly spiralled, with Kate falling into increasingly restrictive and disordered habits.