The hunger that years of anorexia creates isn't just the hunger of an empty stomach, although this is part of it; it's the profound malnutrition that means every system and organ in the body is lacking in nutrients - both calories and micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. Evolutionarily, generalised hunger serves to motivate the organism's search for food in famine conditions, whilst hormonal changes create certain specific dietary preferences: a decrease in leptin production during starvation, for instance, disinhibits nerve signals indicating sweet tastes, making sweet (high-energy) food more attractive. Such changes make it very hard to maintain anorexic behaviour indefinitely - and the longer it continues, the harder it becomes. Trying to maintain it should therefore not be a proud aim for the anorexic. Only self-delusion allows the anorexic to believe that there aren't ultimately just three possible outcomes: death, recovery, or a different eating disorder.

How, then, can the anorexic recover before he or she becomes bulimic - or dies? In my case, there were several factors that, with hindsight, seem to have made it possible for me to avoid both those outcomes, and several related factors that made full recovery possible instead. In discussing those anorexic habits that may have warded against the transition to other eating disorders, I am not suggesting that there are better and worse ways to be anorexic, rather that factors like stability and relatively high calorific intake can make certain outcomes less likely. This does not mean that anorexia in any form isn't comprehensively destructive and potentially fatal.

Firstly, I ate just about enough to keep the hunger always just about bearable, and the physical degradation very slow. When I reviewed the final iteration of my anorexic diet, and added up the total daily calories, which I'd never done when ill, I realised that its three alternating versions were all in fact reasonably calorific: version One totalled 1,655 calories, version Two 1,813, and version Three 1,651. This is more than most strict dieters would consume in a day, and worlds away from the stereotypical anorexic regime of black coffee and half a microscopically chopped apple a day. The difference between this and dieting is that there were no 'cheat days', no lapses, because the primary aim was not weight/fat loss; the hunger and illusion of control became ends in themselves.

In the early years of my decade of illness, there was much greater variation: in the six months leading up to my school exams aged 16, and the month of European travel by myself that followed them, I became practised at missing meals, at telling myself that life would be better if I were slimmer, at learning to love being hungry. Thus I lost 11 kilos in 6 months, and in a year almost 20. Then, with therapy and parentally enforced eating, I put the second 10 kilos back on in another six months, and hovered up and down around the 50kg mark for the next couple of years. Then, in terms of my eating, things stabilised, as I went to university, had the 'freedom' not to eat except what and when I wanted to, and realised that I loved food just as much as I 'needed' the extreme hunger that preceded it. Thus my diet began to set into the pattern it would retain throughout my early and mid-twenties - and the very gentle weight loss of that latter phase set in too. My lowest weight, ten years on from first becoming anorexic, was only 5 kilos less than it was after that first long hot adventurous teenage summer - but there seemed to be a physiological boundary for me around 40 kg (BMI 14.5), which, once crossed, led into the territory of serious emaciation and mental debilitation.

Thus, although the early years of my illness were somewhat nutritionally turbulent, and would therefore have made a good springboard to the greater instability of binge eating or bulimia, somehow that never happened. Perhaps through all the battles with my parents about not-eating, through all the sensations of nausea and entrapment that I experienced when food felt forced upon me, I then still preserved the understanding which returned to me during my final recovery, with relative swiftness: that I love food and don't fear it, and that, crucially, it is only food. And once that phase was over, the stability of intake and relative abundance of food were probably what allowed anorexia to remain in place for so long. This isn't to say that I was not really starving myself: it's important to understand that over seven or eight years of eating around 1,700 calories a day (and with, in my case, an interlude of a few months' concerted if temporary weight gain) it's possible to lose 12 kilos of oneself - one's fat reserves, but also one's bone marrow, muscle, organ tissues - and lose all interest in anything but food.

A desperate, fixated sort of eating (me, 2008)

If one is trying, as I was, to be a 'successful' anorexic, starvation rations in the obvious sense of the term therefore aren't the best way of doing things. The more extreme the starvation, the less sustainable it is. Of course, the concept of 'sustainable starvation' is essentially nonsensical: to starve is to deny one's body what is necessary to it, in a way that brings about suffering and malfunction. The longer this continues, the greater the risks of catastrophic malfunction become - most notably heart failure. Nonetheless, I was able to pretend to myself that because I never went to sleep hungry, that because I ate lots of chocolate every night, and was able to keep working and keep cycling and walking, I was not heading for death. For me, the ultimate proof of strength would not have been to die: despite my depression, I rarely felt that I wanted to die, and suspected that death from anorexia would probably not be the instantaneous event of fatal heart failure, but rather a long and messy process involving hospitals and intravenous drips and despair. For me, then, strength, control, purity, and bravery lay in keeping eating enough to keep my academic studies on track, my body minimally functional, the rest of life minimally intrusive so as not to waste energy on things that were meaningless to me. Of course all this was immensely self-deluded, but there was also a fragment of truth in it: the late-night feats of bread, lettuce, margarine, cereal, and chocolate were sufficient to sustain life over years if not decades, and made it possible for anorexia to retain its grip on me until I recovered, rather than bulimia or binge eating taking its place.