When Sarah Chung was 14, her parents, realising the pressures of the Hong Kong education system, decided to send her to boarding school in Australia.
Within months of arriving, however, the chirpy, hardworking teenager became depressed and lonely. She found it tough to make new friends and assimilate into the foreign environment. It was then that she began to lose weight steadily, almost as if this was the physical manifestation of her inner unhappiness at school.
'It began rather unconsciously,' recalls Chung, now a healthy young woman in her early 20s.
'At first, when I started eating less, I would blame the bad food and change of weather. But as I saw how much weight I was losing, I began to enjoy it. I thought I could pursue the ideal of having good academic results and a perfect body.
'As time progressed, I would talk myself into thinking I wasn't hungry and then I would really not want to eat. A typical lunch would be an apple and I would take a mouthful or two of rice and beans for dinner.'
By the time her mother Andrea was alerted to her condition, the teenager was well on her way to shedding over a third of her original body weight. At her worst point, the 1.6-metre-tall girl weighed just 31kg.
Anorexia nervosa is like the elephant in the room nobody knows how to begin even talking about. Its manifestations may be easy to spot upfront: severe weight loss over a short period, body image distortions and an obsessive fear of weight gain.
