Maria and Katy Campbell, identical twins, can recall the life-changing statement their father made, that would forever alter the course of their lives. They were only 11 years old, when they overheard their father tell their mother, “Gosh, those girls are becoming young women, aren’t they? They’re getting hips.”
The twins, now 33 years old, decided that very day to stop eating in order to lose their blossoming hips…
Maria and Katy have spent the last 20 years of their lives, attempting to “punish” their parents for the remark their father made, so many years ago. Obviously, these women have severe mental issues along with their anorexia.
The twins have preternaturally childish bodies and voices. The illness causes their hair to fall out in clumps. Maria is 5’5” and weighs 87lbs and her sister, Katy is the same height, but weighs 70lbs. Neither twin has even started their period yet, because their body weight was never enough to support one.
The twins say they feel like the anorexia has imprisoned them.
Katy states, ‘I can’t walk any more. My back hurts, my heartbeat is irregular, I’ve got osteoporosis, chronic gastric pain and pancreatitis. I’m on diuretics because my kidneys don’t work.
‘Katy and I began to resent Mum because she was so slim,’ says Maria. ‘We looked up to her as a role model and felt we came up short.’
‘Maria started keeping a food diary and would jot down everything we ate, our weight and how much exercise we’d done. We started skipping breakfast and exercising fanatically, doing 50 lengths of the pool in the morning and gymnastics after school.
‘We had a system where we’d starve ourselves for six days, only eating 400 calories precisely a day — ten pieces of pic ’n’ mix, an orange, a banana and a diet cola,’ says Katy. ‘Then, on the final day, we’d eat anything and everything we could get our hands on — bread, pasta, crisps, cakes.’
‘When we were 15, Mum noticed we were losing weight, but we brushed her off. She began to sit with us during supper — but one of us would distract her while the other put food up their sleeves.’
Despite the illness, both girls gained excellent grades at GCSE and A-level and were accepted into medical school at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
Maria explains: ‘We were having just one cup of coffee and a packet of chocolate buttons a day, and Katy had lost a lot of weight. So we were called in and told that she would have to go to hospital to recover.
‘I remember one of the doctors saying they had noticed I had lost weight, too, but that my weight loss wasn’t quite as bad as Katy’s.
‘Rather than be relieved, I thought: “No one is going to say that Katy is better than me at something.” It was a trigger for me losing another 2st.’
Because of this deadly competitive streak, the girls were sent to different hospitals in London in the hope they would not be able to encourage each other’s weight loss.
‘We were force-fed 3,000 calories a day through tubes,’ says Maria. ‘We were not allowed any contact with each other, but we got around that by writing letters under pseudonyms and getting friends to pass them on. We also managed to get hold of mobile phones and hid them in cupboards.
‘It was the first time I had been apart from Katy and we were both in pieces. It’s hard enough being forced to eat, but I hated being without my sister.
Incredibly, they both graduated from medical school in 2009 and are now qualified doctors.
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