Sandra Holdsworth remembered being awake at two o’clock in the morning she began writing letters to her husband and children while lying in her hospital bed. She was 28 years old when she found out she was ill with an incurable disease. “I’ve been gone a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with me,” she said. “So it was sort of more not as a relief, but then figuring out well I at least now know what’s wrong with me and how to deal with it.”

Brooke Langman has spent much of her life trying not to become a statistic. “I was sick enough; my heart could have stopped beating at any moment,” she said. At 16, she attended the youth day program for eating disorders at Southlake Regional Health Centre (in Newmarket, Ont.), the only hospital in York Region to offer any sort of eating disorder program. She said she found the program ineffective.