Hospitalised with an eating disorder as a teenager, she recovered to become a campaigner. Her mission? To show that eating disorders aren’t always visible
Hope Virgo’s description of her descent into anorexia is so harrowing and filled with danger that meeting her in real life – in the south London flat she shares with her fiance – is like meeting the personification of triumph or optimism. “In the media, you see the same stories, the same distressed, emaciated person; you hear of people dying,” Virgo says. “We need to hear those stories, but at the same time, I really believe that a full recovery is possible. I think we lose sight of that glimmer of hope.”
In her book Stand Tall Little Girl, she gives the figures to back this up: 40% of people who have had an eating disorder never think about it again; 15% are unable to fight it off and are stuck in it; and 45% of people find a way to live with it, using coping mechanisms. Virgo’s pioneering work has an overarching purpose: to say, in her words and through her actions, that recovery is possible. It’s a rescue mission launched from regular life into a world of crisis – in which no one is seen as irrecoverable.
