As teen soap Hollyoaks builds up to screening the first ever TV death from anorexia we spoke to one East Lancashire women who has lived with the harrowing eating disorder for 20 years.

ELIZABETH Foster's fight with anorexia has blighted all her adult life costing her career as a teacher and her marriage.

At one point Elizabeth, of Greenway Street, Darwen, weighed just four and a half stone and had to be fed through a tube.

Now she has her condition under control and has spoken out in a bid to help others who may be suffering in silence.

"I started with anorexia when I was 16. At the same time I suffered from manic depression and the two conditions became entwined.

"As I stopped eating my weight plummeted to just four and a half stone while I was university.

"If I ate just an apple and a Ryvita biscuit in a day I thought I had made a pig of myself.

"Anorexics don't like people to know their problem. It is an easy condition to hide just by telling people you've already eaten or you're not hungry." says Elizabeth.

By keeping her illness a secret the first time Elizabeth received any professional help for her anorexia was in 1993 - 20 years after she first started suffering when it was impossible for her to hide her problem.

By this time the condition had led to her taking early retirement from Rhyddings High School, Oswaldtwistle, after long spells in hospital affected her work and her marriage had also broken down as a result.

Elizabeth said: "I was a home economics teacher until 1990 and there was a toilet at the back of the classroom.

"If the pupils asked me to taste their food I would go and make myself sick in the toilet afterwards and take laxatives. That is how bad it was.

"At first it started as a way of having something in my life I felt in control of when I was a moody teenager, then I became obsessed and the illness becomes like a friend you can rely on that you don't want to give up."

Elizabeth, who now refuses to weigh herself but looks healthy and happy, criticised the current obsession for ultra-thin fashionable size zero models and urged young people to look out for each other.

She added: "If your friend is showing signs of an eating disorder do not copy them or compete to be the thinnest. It is not cool or attractive to be close to death. You must tell someone.

"Your friend may not realise they have a problem until it is too late. When I was four and a half stone and in hospital I kept asking the doctors why I was in there.

"I thought I was fine. Even now I don't know if I may fall back into it if tragedy hits my life."

Elizabeth praised Hollyoaks for showing the real dangers of anorexia, the biggest killer among sufferers of mental illnesses, where one in five cases results in death.

The C4 teen soap is currently screening one of its most controversial storylines in which Hannah Ashworth (played by Emma Rigby) befriends a young model Melissa and becomes locked in a deadly competition to lose weight.

Tonight viewers will watch as the eating disorder turns deadly.

Producer Bryan Kirkwood said: "If a single viewer gets help as a result of this storyline, then it will have been worthwhile."