Eating Disorders affect even those you wouldn’t suspect

My best friend is an amazing seventeen year old but he is a perfectionist and has always wanted to be better than he is. I met him in year 5 at a selective school and even then I could see his desire to be in control and perfect. He has always achieved his goals, and is willing to sacrifice anything for them. By year 8, he began to have a serious relationship with a girl and she was in love with him but he was afraid to ruin the friendship. The day he decided he wanted to be with her, she told him she’d moved on to someone new. It crushed him and he began to have family conflict and left home for a few months. He began self harming and the rumors at school began to develop and he became isolated and didn’t want to talk to anyone. He moved back home but the conflict got worse and became physical so his parents decided to rip him away from his few friends and send him to boarding school. At boarding school, he found a new way of punishing himself and stopped eating. He starved himself for months and his weight dropped to 52kg, unhealthily low for his 175cm frame He only ate one apple per day and only realised how sick he was when his hair fell out and he had trouble walking because he was so dizzy. Emotionally he became obsessed, and that made him very dark and lonely but he pretended to be okay on the outside. He ended up in hospital and gained 7kg back but lost it again as soon as he was released. He went to hospital a second time and this time he began to recover. He left boarding school, moved back home and has started a TAFE course and he is a lot happier.