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Fit and healthy, Olympic hopeful Mary-Kate Slattery has a bright future ahead inside and out of the ring.
But it took the law student at Trinity College Dublin a long time to be happy with herself.
The 21-year-old amateur boxer talked openly about how her desire to be thin as a child made her put her own health at risk.
She told Ryan Tubridy this morning of how her life has evolved after being diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at the age of nine.
‘It was a person in my head telling me not to eat… the two of us were very much on a mission to lose weight, to scare people, to drive myself in to this frenzy of starvation and self loathing,’she said.
Deciding to name her anorexia ‘Eunice’, an imaginary friend, she said ‘it was nothing I could understand’.
With a death in the family being a trigger factor for her illness, she said that losing weight soon became ‘a source of happiness’.
At nine years of age, Mary Kate wanted to be like Kate Moss who she observed in magazines with bones sticking out of her feet, thinking ‘I want to have that’.
Leaving school to get help while she was in fourth clbad, she was too young for St. John of Gods so she went to the UK after spending time in Crumlin Children’s Hospital.
At one point, she felt that she nearly died as her heart rate dropped so low.
Since discovering a love of boxing, the law student has not looked back and hopes to be the first Irish pro boxer and barrister.
Talking about the weight element, she said that it shows how far she has come, saying: ‘It’s really come full circle for me.’
Listen back to The Ryan Tubridy Show on RTE Radio 1:
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