The journey that followed took the couple to the UK, where Vardy worked for one of the world’s leading universities, through Covid, lockdowns, a second battle with anorexia, then moving home and starting a family.
Speaking to Vardy from her home in Ōtepoti Dunedin, where she lives with Tom, her mum, and their young daughter, she reflects on the eating disorder she never wanted to be defined by, how it’s too easy to hide harmful behaviours behind “wellness culture”, and how her experience has led her to build a much-needed service in Aotearoa.
After completing her PhD in Psychology, Vardy was courted by Imperial College in London as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. In 2018, she and Tom moved across, and Vardy began a world-first clinical trial investigating psychedelic-assisted therapy for people with anorexia. Vardy didn’t tell her colleagues about her history.
“I indicated I had lived experience, but I didn’t speak about it openly because I didn’t want to be looked down upon or have a black mark against my name.”
She threw herself into the opportunity, working gruelling hours, and soon she was being pegged as the next big thing in psychedelic clinical research. Then Covid hit, and uncertainty ruled. With everything feeling uncontrollable, Vardy began reaching for coping tools she’d used in the past, the same tools that triggered her first round of anorexia at 20, as an undergraduate at the University of Otago.
During her time at Otago, Vardy says “some quite traumatic things happened” that left her feeling she had no control over what was happening around her or over her body.
“I didn’t feel like I was worthy of taking up space. I turned to food as a way of control and self-punishment, and as a way of shrinking myself.”
She was applauded for losing weight.
“I got feedback that my coping mechanism was working.”
After a year of inpatient and outpatient treatment, she went into a long period of what she describes as “pseudo-recovery,” hiding the long tendrils of her eating disorder under her high-achieving academic career and fitness regimes.
“People would say, ‘I wish I had the self-control to go to the gym every day.’”
She shares her story openly because she wants to dispel myths about eating disorders. They don’t usually come from a desire for a certain body type, but rather a need to control the uncontrollable. They are usually triggered – across all ages, genders, ethnicities and orientations – by the perfect storm of difficult life circumstances and access to what seems like an acceptable, even “healthy” coping mechanism: dieting, restricting, or obsessive exercising.
Vardy also understands the shame of an eating disorder; food is celebrated in many cultures, it’s a way of bringing people together, and there is tremendous shame in having a battle with something essential, something seen as joyful to many (unlike battles with destructive substances). Which is why it’s easier to hide restrictive behaviours under “wellness”, and exercise, and she says orthorexia – an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating – is on the rise.
“People use clean eating as a form of restriction, yet masking it behind wellness trends.”
She doesn’t like the term “recovered” and prefers healing. During years of “pseudo-recovery”, she would eat in front of others, but internally still found comfort in restriction. Physical recovery, she says, “is very different from healing your mind, heart, and wairua”.
Then, during lockdown in London, Vardy couldn’t get to the gym.
“I started falling back into restrictive eating habits. It was easy because I didn’t have to go out and be social. Working from home, no one could see what I was doing apart from my husband. But if he tried to question me, I would bite.”
With a PhD in psychology, she knew how to say the right things to appear well. But her world narrowed and more things became unacceptable.
“The active behavioural restriction was around food, but my work also became a coping mechanism – a socially acceptable one. The same characteristics that make me good at having an ED made me good at work. An academic environment feeds off that kind of mindset of being very focused, driven, at the top of my game, willing to work any hour. Both of those things would play off each other.”
By early 2022, her health was worsening, but she was still publishing papers, teaching, and performing at a high level. Nobody said anything.
“From the university and my supervisor’s perspective. Why stop me?”
It was one of Vardy’s PhD students, Hannah Douglass, who finally spoke up. “She said, ‘Enough is enough. I can’t watch anymore’. Seeing that distress in somebody else was an eye-opener for me.”
By Easter, Vardy was in hospital and then admitted to inpatient care, followed by a day programme. She was under the NHS for seven months, describing it as the most challenging period of her life.
But something happened during that treatment that changed her trajectory and life. For the first time, she had the space and opportunity to address previous traumatic events.
“I worked with some incredible people who helped me work through a lot of that trauma that I was carrying that hadn’t been addressed previously.”
Something clicked and shifted. She reassessed her relationship with her eating disorder.
“I made a commitment to healing.”
Vardy and her husband left the UK in February 2023, and she also left academia “because it wasn’t healthy for me”. She started having conversations with people in the ED sector, working with EDANZ, who support whānau supporting individuals living with an eating disorder. Unlike most other countries in the OECD, there hasn’t been a charity supporting affected individuals living with eating disorders in Aotearoa.
“Not only does this gap put pressure on an already overstretched health system, but it leaves those with eating disorders feeling isolated, forgotten, and without hope,” says Vardy.
In 2024, through wide consultation in the sector with people with lived experience, researchers and clinicians, the idea of JourneyED was co-developed. She wants the organisation to be an alternative or addition to clinical treatments, a place where it’s okay if you don’t fit the traditional recovery model or if you are, like Vardy, labelled as “severe enduring”.
The way JourneyED aims to do this is via peer support workers; people with lived experience who are trained to support others through recovery.
“There’s tremendous power in sitting alongside someone, saying, ‘I know where you are right now and there’s hope for you’.”
Peer support empowers people by giving them agency.
“It’s about supporting an individual on their journey to whatever being well looks like for them,” Vardy says.
Treatments that incorporate lived experience also demonstrate better outcomes according to evidence from the wider mental health sector and growing evidence within the eating disorder community. As a result, the New Zealand Government’s refreshed Eating Disorder Strategy recognises the role of people with lived experience in supporting others on their healing journey.
“Peer support is also about systems change. As it proliferates, we’ll see a shift in the way we approach mental health treatment towards one that’s more compassionate, mana-enhancing and empowering.”
In May, JourneyED took its first step towards enabling this with the launch of its first online peer support group. In time, JourneyED will develop an advocacy arm. An email confirming it had become a registered charity came through the same week Vardy’s daughter was born.
“It was a very big week,” she says.
She now holds anorexia at a distance.
“It doesn’t control me.”
As for Douglass, the PhD student in the UK? She’s living in Auckland and is a great friend of Dr Vardy. She’s organising a fundraiser quiz for JourneyED at Coco’s Cantina on July 22.
Donations taken at journeyed.org.nz.
EATING DISORDERS
Do you need help?
- Get in touch with Eating Disorders Association of New Zealand if you need help finding a private provider in your area by phoning Ph 0800 2 EDANZ or emailing info@ed.org.nz.
- If you need urgent help, reach out to your GP or local mental health provider.
Or if you need to talk to someone else: