Beauty Queen: More Help For Disorders

30 June 2015, 06:43 | Updated: 30 March 2016, 13:50

An East Midlands beauty queen has told Capital she wants GPs to stop looking at weight when they diagnose eating disorders.

Holly Desai, Miss Leicestershire, has suffered from bulimia and when she went to her doctor was told she wasn't thin enough for the treatment she wanted:

'Not everybody who has these sort of problems is drastically under weight, as in, they might not look how you imagine them to look.

'In the past, I'd been to the doctors and was told my BMI was low but it wasn't low enough for them to do anything about it.

'Basically, the message I got was ''You're not thin enough, come back when you're more unwell.'

West Leicestershire Clinical Commissioning Group, who deal with treatments in the East Midlands, say looking at patients weight is part of the criteria for accessing specialist services but say GPs and nurses can help locally too.