I am not vain, but I was anorexic.

I am not sure some of my friends understood the difference. Their incomprehension bred a lack of patience and compassion which occasionally manifested itself in a running first person narrative of my eating habits. I’m pretty sure they found it hilarious.

“I’m only going to have a banana for lunch because I can’t possibly manage any more.”

“And then I’m going to go to the bathroom and throw it up.”

“I wish I could be like you, and never be hungry,” someone remarked, after yet another botched attempt at clearing a half-plate of tomato pasta. I could have replied that I was hungry, so hungry it hurt. Or that, over time, my body had become incapable of spontaneously digesting large amounts of food, so that I actually couldn’t eat an entire meal without making myself violently sick. But I was fifteen, and – if I’m being honest with myself – I was scared of being forced to gain weight. I didn’t want my eating disorder prized from my fingertips by doctors or counsellors.

So what my friends saw was a blooming shrinking violet. A girl whose grades soared even as her BMI plummeted, who smiled brazenly as she tipped the contents of her lunchbox untouched into the trash. Looking back, I can’t really blame them for their utter failure to understand. I – and society as a whole – should have been more vocal about what having an eating disorder feels like, rather than what it looks like.

Society persists in seeing eating disorders as a kind of beautiful crusade, a graceful if slightly dizzy waltz towards physical perfection. Magazines delight in turning struggling celebrities into tragic bikini-clad heroines even while the headlines shriek of concern for their lives. Furthermore, though it would be an anachronism and a cliché to suggest that eating disorders sprang fresh into existence from the glossy, airbrushed pages of Vogue, popular culture’s mounting obsession with size zero does make it difficult for many to conceive of an eating disorder entirely as a curse. The temptation to glorify or romanticise them is omnipresent. And it is this image of the enviable, blonde ascetic which props up stigmas and misconceptions surrounding such illnesses. Sufferers are still too readily dismissed on the grounds of vanity or attention-seeking.

Even where we identify a problem, the societal preoccupation with appearance still impedes us in our understanding and treatment of such diseases. The shock value of the anorexic body has made it the poster girl for eating disorders – and yes, it’s always a girl, despite the fact that men now constitute around 11 per cent of ED sufferers. Anorexia accounts for only 10 per cent of the overall eating disorder presence in British society; bulimia is, by some accounts, four times as common, but much less discussed. And I wonder if many readers have even heard of OSFED (known until recently as EDNOS, or Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified). That’s an umbrella category that covers “atypical” cases of AN and BN, and other conditions such as Binge Eating Disorder.

It is interesting to consider to what extent we ignore these lesser-known strains of eating disorder because they are less photogenic. Bingeing is messy. There is no sense of the glamour or the selfless transcendence with which mainstream perception equates anorexia. Most importantly, though, those affected often maintain a BMI which is either healthy or slightly overweight. They look fine. Our image of the modern St Simeon Stylites, emaciated, undaunted, shunts to one side the reality for many sufferers.

This is not to say that sufferers of anorexia have it easier because their visibly low weight ratifies their claim to a real mental disorder. When you already struggle with a disease that compels you to seek and maintain an unnaturally low body weight, it is wholly unhelpful to have your insecurities reinforced by society’s criteria for judging exactly how ill you are. Just this week, the UK's leading ED charity, b-eat, has spoken out against NHS practices of denying treatment to severely ill persons whose BMIs were deemed not low enough to qualify. Equally, often well-meaning assumptions that “weight-restored” sufferers are emotionally in a better place can be confusing and detrimental to recovery.

In her recent, stunningly candid article, Isla Cowan does well to remind us that an eating disorder is not a disease of the body, but the mind. Thinness may be a symptom, but it is not the definition of the illness. Neither is it a redeeming feature. Waking, springing out of bed and congratulating yourself on how slender you look, and effortlessly skipping another day of meals because you “want to be Mary-Kate” – to quote a song on the topic – is not how eating disorders work.

Having an eating disorder is about lying to the people you love the most because of the extent to which you dislike yourself. It’s about flushing all your advent calendar chocolate down the toilet because you’re so scared of the distant possibility of eating it you don’t want it in your room. It’s about waking up in the morning and feeling so weak you don’t know how you will walk to school, or the slavish, debilitating addiction to bingeing when you are alone. It’s about incessant, bone-deep cold, hunger pangs worse than period pains. It is, in short, a complete mess and a nightmare. It is the farthest throw, the longest, rockiest road away from glamour and self-control.

Cambridge knows this. As a student community, we are pretty good at acknowledging and understanding eating disorders. We have many excellent spaces to discuss mental health issues, and many students willing to weigh in with their personal experiences.

What, though, about the rest of the world? Nowhere on the Science or PSHE curriculums is provision made for mental health education, even though an estimated 87 per cent of eating disorders begin before the subject’s 20th birthday. I wonder how different the reception at school would have been if my friends and I had even understood the basics. Dismantling the image of the vain martyr is essential if we are going to disarm stigmas and help people to address the reality of the disease their friends are fighting, rather than the oversimplified, damaging concept we seem to have constructed. The only way we can be more compassionate in our handling of these illnesses is by being, as a society, more honest about what they actually entail.

We reckon that airbrushed models cause eating disorders. It is so, so ironic that we are airbrushing eating disorders too.