In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. Nothing very dramatic caused this. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb that entered her mouth, opening the fridge just to smell the food, making her house quake as she did star jumps over and over again.