Sick transit

Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed her thumbs deep into her eyelids, allowed herself to visualise a chocolate brownie and started to salivate. After work she stopped at the supermarket and bought some brownies… along with a chocolate loaf cake and a large pot of cream to pour over it, a giant chocolate bar, an apple puff, two eclairs, a cream slice, a selection of reduced pastries, a loaf of bread, a packet of butter and three packets of biscuits: bourbons, custard creams and Maryland cookies. When she got home she ate it all in under four hours.

In her thoughtful new memoir on her 14-year struggle with bulimia, Jones describes a moment of sharp self-awareness experienced two hours into that binge. There she is: a smart, attractive young woman, surrounded by empty food wrappers:

I think how insane this would look to someone watching.