Ray (not his real name) dropped out of Anglo Chinese Junior College last year because the 19-year-old was too ill to continue.

A good-looking boy with a ready smile, Ray began battling a severe eating disorder three years ago.

It was around that time, at the end of 2005, that Ray's mother noticed he did not mix much with friends any more and that he barely ate any food.

He exercised obsessively, making a religion of his daily run and spending hours at the gym.

'I thought I was healthy. I wanted to look good and have that buff look,' he said.

But he could not look at food normally.

'I would look at something and think, 'Can I see someone who looks good eating it?' If I couldn't, then I would not eat it,' he said.

He became dangerously underweight and had to be admitted to hospital in December 2005.

'The strange thing is that I felt normal. I thought the people around me were overreacting,' Ray said.

His perspective was in fact typical of people with eating disorders: Ray thought he was just being healthy, not realising that he was endangering his life. He thought his parents were trying to fatten him up.

As soon as he was discharged from hospital, he started the cycle of exercising and starving himself again.

'If my friends wanted to meet me for dinner, I would cancel that because it clashed with my exercise schedule,' he said.

In March 2006, Ray was hospitalised again. Once his weight stabilised, he was admitted to the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) for two months as he was also dangerously depressed. He was miserable and tried to run away from there.

After several admissions to the hospital and IMH, Ray realised that the desire to look good had hijacked his life.

'I just wanted to be happy,' he said.

Turning point
In March 2007, he told senior psychiatrist Dr Lee Ee Lian, who heads the Eating Disorders Programme at SGH, that he wanted to change his lifestyle.

He started attending the day programme for people with eating disorders at the Life Centre, when it opened in October last year.

He goes to the centre every day now, where along with other teenagers like him, he is taught to eat normally and encouraged to re-examine how he looks at himself.

Ray said coming to the centre has helped him accept all parts of himself and to stop the obsessive scrutiny to which he subjected himself.

In the presence of psychologist Evelyn Foo, Ray said he has learnt to think of the person with the distorted thoughts as Rex.

'It's like fighting an opponent. You look in the mirror and it's an evil version of you. Rex is the me I don't want to be,' he said.

Ray wants to be happy and successful and he has come to realise that he had equated 'being good looking' with these things. This was particularly fuelled by the fact that he was fat as a child and felt that the only way to be popular was to be good-looking. These are the feelings he identified and is working through with a psychologist.

When he is at the Life Centre, he sometimes visits the wards so he can talk to other patients with eating disorders.

'I like it here. All of us are kind of going through the same thing,' he said.

Ray said the one thing that has kept him coming back is the concern shown by SGH's Eating Disorders Team.

'They stuck with me. Even when I was in IMH, Dr Lee told me they would accept me back in the programme any time I was ready,' Ray said.

He plans to continue in the programme for a few more months and find a job.

'I hope I find something that's fun,' he said.

This story was first published in The Mind Your Body supplement on Feb 20, 2008.

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