500cals a Day Was All We Ate ; the Cheeky Girls Are Being Serious - About the Extreme Anorexia That Made Them Read Food Labels Instead of Eating, Turned Their Skin Yellow and Caused a Strange Fur to Grow All Over Their Bodies... We Would Tell Mum We Had Been Out for a Big Lunch...In Fact We'd Done Two Hours of Power-Walking

Summary

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Their hair is thick and glossy, their arms are more than capable of lifting designer shopping bags, their dresses are a size ten and when the Cheeky Girls pout for the photographer their faces are pretty and rounded. Yet despite her and her twin's own healthy good looks, Monica Irimia is scathing about other famous women.

'Don't believe celebrities who say they are naturally skinny yet look so thin that their bones stick out,' she says firmly. 'They're lying.' She should know. For she and Gabriela lied too. They lied to their own mother about eating in restaurants and they lied to one another about how much they were eating - common behavioural traits of those suffering from anorexia nervosa, a psychiatric disorder that affects an estimated 250,000 women in the UK.

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Extract

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500cals a Day Was All We Ate ; the Cheeky Girls Are Being Serious - About the Extreme Anorexia That Made Them Read Food Labels Instead of Eating, Turned Their Skin Yellow and Caused a Strange Fur to Grow All Over Their Bodies... We Would Tell Mum We Had Been Out for a Big Lunch...In Fact We'd Done Two Hours of Power-Walking

Not only did the twins' weight drop to less than seven stone - terrifyingly low for women 5ft 6in tall - they took their bodies to the brink of hospitalisation, suffering kidney stones, stomach ulcers and hair loss. Perhaps most worryingly of all, their periods stopped.

Today, Monica is 81/2 stone and Gabriela is nearer nine. After the photoshoot, they tuck into chicken sandwiches and chocolate minicakes along with everyone else. The twins, 26, believe their problems began when they moved to the UK in 2002 from their native Cluj-Napoca in Romania. Their mother, Margit, had divorced their father, Doru, a doctor, and married Ray Semal, a British exhibition c...

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