Her extreme battle with anorexia left her in an intensive care unit fighting for life.
Now Rubie Cousins, 24, is set to help others with the devastating condition…

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When she regained consciousness in hospital a nurse was brought to tears.

Weighing just five and a half stone, her skin was stretched over her ribs to a painful degree and medics agreed she was lucky to be alive.

Living on half a cupful of cereal a day, Rubie Cousins’s health had been of grave concern to those close to her for some time.

Then, as her mother hung washing in the garden one afternoon, Rubie suddenly collapsed.

“Everything shut down, just like that,” she said. “I’m told I’m lucky I pulled through.

“I woke up in ICU with a bubble-wrap blanket over me. I had pneumonia and simply didn’t have an immune system to fight it.

“I remember seeing a nurse with tears in her eyes. My mum must have told her what had been going on.”

Rubie freely admits she owes her mother, Yvonne, everything.

She has stood by as her daughter spent years wasting away before her eyes. She has also put the family home on the market to help pay for life-changing treatment.

Yvonne’s sacrifices have thankfully paid off, with Rubie now on the road to recovery and looking to help others.

She said that contrary to what many will think, her eating disorder had little or nothing to do with a desire to conform to any body ideal.

“There’s a preconception that it’s about wanting to be thin and beautiful, but with me that wasn’t the case,” she said.

“It’s true that the media and fashion industries are guilty of creating unhealthy ideals, particularly for women.

“But with me it was about control. Everything beforehand felt out of control and suddenly I had a grip on things.

“It was my way of controlling my life.”

Speaking to Rubie now, it is clear she is a determined and strong-willed young woman.

Channeled in the wrong direction, it was this iron will that nearly destroyed her.

“I cut out high-sugar foods to start, then gradually cut out more and more,” she said.

“By the worst stage, I was eating half a cupful of bran flakes a day. I was down to five and a half stone. I’m back to eight now.

“You suppress your appetite. If I was hungry I would drink water to fill me up.

“I was also going to the gym every day for up to five hours. It was a very dangerous way to live.”

Rubie was a student at Christ Church University in Canterbury when her condition began to spiral beyond her control.

“One of my friends who I hadn’t seen for a long time said ‘God Rubie, you’ve lost a lot of weight’,” she said.

“I felt quite proud and yet my bones were showing. I was disgusted by myself at the same time. It was a strange contradiction. I looked emaciated.”

She is still not sure how she succumbed to anorexia nervosa, but thinks it began when she was 18.

“It started off progressively,” she said. “The catalyst was when a father figure to me died. He was a really big figure in my life.

“He had cancer of the throat. I hadn’t really wanted to see him in hospital. Then he died and I felt guilty that I hadn’t visited enough.”

Rubie, who is fairly tall and naturally slim, says that the tell-tale signs of the condition took some time to take a hold.

“With me I didn’t lose weight in my face so I could hide it under my clothes,” she said.

“But my mum knew straight away. I knew I had a problem but I didn’t want to admit it. My mum approached my GP who said things were getting serious.”

Rubie was admitted as an inpatient to a specialist unit for people with eating disorders, which, she says, did not work for her.

“Eating disorders are very competitive,” she said. “A lot of the other patients were similar to me – strong-willed and determined. So you almost compete to eat the least and have the worst disorder.”

Around the same time she also began drinking. “I wouldn’t drink a lot – I wouldn’t need to. I had so little food in my system that it would only take a couple of glasses of wine and I’d be drunk.

“It actually made me slightly more relaxed about my eating and I thought it was helping me.”

Three years ago Rubie, who is now teetotal, decided to pour a glass at her home in Worth, near Deal. She also decided she could allow herself a small slice of peach.

Disaster struck. “That was all it took,” she said. “I went into a choking fit. The peach had gone into my lung rather than my stomach. Because I was so weak, I collapsed.

“If my mum hadn’t been in the garden I would have died. I woke up in ICU in Margate and was there for a week and a half.

“My body hadn’t been able to fight and I caught pneumonia. I’m lucky to be alive.”

Rubie’s brush with death proved to be a turning point.

Her mother scraped and borrowed money and sent Rubie to a specialist addiction clinic in South Africa.

Rubie ended up staying for a year and a half and said it changed her life.

“It was rehab,” she said. “It was run by people who had had addictions. I was the only one there with an eating disorder.

“It’s an addiction like any other. I had something of a eureka moment out there.

“We were watching a show put on by little kids in one of the shanty villages.

“One of the boys asked me why I was so skinny. It was ironic and it was an eye-opener.” Rubie returned to Kent two years ago, weighing a much healthier 8st 2lb.

She left her course in policing at Christ Church and eventually enrolled on a course in health and social care at Canterbury College, where she won a most outstanding university student award.

Part of her course involved volunteer work. This brought her into contact with the Canterbury Area District Mental Health Forum – the help centre which is now being rebranded as Take Off.

Crucially, it is run by those who have battled demons and struggled with mental and physical health issues themselves.

Rubie helps people with a variety of issues, assessing their goals and directing them to services that can help.

But she is also starting a new specialist help group for those with eating disorders, which will open in next month.

“I fell in love with the place, with their ideas,” she said.

“I put forward the idea of an eating disorder group and they loved it. They liked the idea of me having received help in Britain and in South Africa. It gives me two perspectives.

“The peer support approach focuses on the recovery rather than the past. It wasn’t for me, just going over and over the past.

“It helps a bit but you need to look forward too, to get a sense of purpose.” She said her experience will prove invaluable. Eating disorders are very misunderstood. Unless you’ve had one you’re not going to understand. I was closed to people from professional bodies,” she said.

Rubie’s daily food intake might suggest she has made a recovery.

“I’ll have porridge for breakfast. I can drink milk now, in my coffee too. It used to be black.

“I might have an apple on my way in. Vegetable soup for lunch, perhaps. And fish and vegetables for dinner.

"I cried when I looked at a picture of myself. My arm looked like a bone with loose skin hanging off it - Rubie Cousins

“I’ll eat some sweets during the day too.”

But asked whether she is ‘cured’, Rubie said she doubts it.

“I don’t know if you ever recover,” she said.

“Some people may be able to, but the longer it goes on for and the more severe – that has an effect.

“I hope to recover, but I don’t know.”

She said she is still haunted by the pressures of the condition.

“It doesn’t take long to get hold of you. The disorder was my best friend. It’s like a voice in my head.

“I still hear it now. I’m still very restricted with what I eat.”

That said, food is once again a source of pleasure.

“I look forward to eating now. I enjoy it,” she said. “I can enjoy a meal out with friends, but I have to know the menu in advance. I pre-order in my mind. I guess I still need that control.”

She keeps few reminders of the past, with most photos long-deleted.

“I cried when I looked at a picture of myself,” she said. “My arm looked like a bone with loose skin hanging off it.”

For now, she said, she is content to focus on the future.