A new survey on body image reveals a quarter of young girls have suffered from an eating disorder by the time they reach 14. Zoe Gordon, who was 12 years old when she first developed anorexia, and her mum, Helen, speak to Women's Editor Lindsay Jennings about their battle with the disorder.

"IT WAS Easter and we were going to go out for a picnic," recalls Helen Gordon. "We were getting everything ready and I remember Zoe said 'you don't understand, I'm not well'.

She sat and poured it all out, saying she didn't know what to do. She didn't want to live anymore. But at that point, you think you can make things better - like parents do."

Helen, 50, is describing the moment her 12-year-old daughter was unable to cope with her heavy burden any longer. Helen and her husband Les listened in stunned silence as Zoe confessed to her parents that she was not eating her lunch and was leaving most of her other meals.

"People have said 'well, how did you not notice anything' but it was so slow, you just didn't see it," says Helen. "At first she was taking a packed lunch to school with sandwiches and a biscuit and then she would say 'I don't need to have the biscuit because I don't have time to eat it. I'll have it when I come in'.

"At the same time I remember her saying she was having trouble with a few friends in class. They were weighed in the classroom and she was the heaviest girl and two or three boys were calling her Mr Blobby. She was quite tall for her age, and it coincided with her starting her periods.

"I blamed myself when she told me. Every parent and every mother I've ever spoken to will go through their lives, minute by minute, to find what they could possibly have done to give them that eating disorder."

For Zoe, now 20, it was the early onset of puberty at the age of ten which she believes was a key factor in her developing the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. She had started her periods and her young body was beginning to change shape.

"It was really quite a shock to be honest," she admits. "I looked different and felt different because I had boobs and I felt bigger. My schoolfriends ostracised me, so I just wanted to lose a bit of weight."

Initially, Zoe says she lost weight healthily, replacing processed food such as crisps with fruit. But while her weight loss led to compliments from her peers at school, she still felt like "the fat girl" inside.

"I thought I'd try harder," she says. "It was about control. It was the only thing I knew that I could have in my life which no-one else had. It was like an independent power, if people didn't speak to me I knew I had something they didn't."

But, as the months went by, her burden eventually became too much to bear, and she broke down before the family picnic. Her shocked parents booked her an appointment with her GP.

"She was referred to a child psychiatrist and then to a dietician who was very nice but told her to eat carbohydrates, so she would just eat baked potatoes," says her mum. "I felt powerless. It was heartbreaking because all she would eat was baked potatoes or spaghetti hoops. Even if we went out for the day, she would be sitting at the side, eating a cooked baked potato."

Eventually, Zoe was admitted for treatment to the Young People's Unit at Newcastle General Hospital. She was 13, and at 5ft 5ins tall weighed just five and a half stone. The experience in the hospital had its "good and bad points", she says.

"I think, given the age that I was, I don't think I should have been put into a psychiatric ward with people who didn't just have eating problems and were a lot older than me," she says quietly. It was very disturbing sometimes. One of the girls was a self-harmer... I had to grow up quite fast. I think it needed to be more specialised - I didn't really understand what anorexia was."

In hospital she chose to eat, rather than be force fed.

"I was always scared of that, being force fed," she says. "Some people like it because it takes the control away from them, but for me it was the other way round."

The several weeks in hospital worked to begin with, she says, and her weight rose to seven stone. But then she learned "new tricks of the trade," such as ways of hiding food, and her weight quickly plummeted again to five and a half stone. She can barely remember the exact daily amount she would eat. On some days it was a portion of jacket potato she had cut into small pieces, on others an apple.

"Because I lost weight quite drastically I did have memory loss," says Zoe. "I can remember losing about a stone and everyone saying how great I looked and the next thing being about six and a half stone and going to talk to my GP."

She also had an addiction to exercise at the height of the illness, working out for two to three hours a day with aerobics classes and running. Apart from the weight loss, she also experienced other symptoms. Not surprisingly, she was constantly tired and cold and her periods stopped.

"I used to find dried fig rolls or bits of bread because she would shove them up her sleeves at dinner time," says her mum. "In some ways you have to laugh because it was like a magic trick. I used to find them and panic and think everything was going downhill. It can be such a manipulative illness."

This time doctors felt Zoe needed specialist help and, because there are so few places for specialist treatment through the NHS, she was referred to the private Rhodes Farm Clinic in London, which was paid for by the health service. The treatment there proved more effective for her. The day her parents took her, the staff gave her a date for coming home, and it was more of a "home from home".

"It was all people with eating disorders who were being treated and we were allowed to do more things," says Zoe. "We could go horseriding if we wanted and they had their own school."

Both Zoe and her mum partially blame the influence of our Western obsession with celebrities and diets, coupled with low self esteem, for causing eating disorders in an increasingly young age group.

In a recent survey for the teen magazine Bliss, two thirds of youngsters said pictures of body-perfect celebrities put pressure on them to be slim, with two-thirds of them thinking they were overweight. Alarmingly, of the 2,000 girls questioned, a quarter of them said they had already suffered from an eating disorder - either anorexia, bulimia or binge eating - by the time they were aged 14. And, according to the Eating Disorders Association, anorexia has been known to develop in children as young as seven.

Spurred on by her experience with her daughter, Helen helped set up the Eating Disorders Care Group in her home town of Monkseaton, near Whitley Bay.

"It's somewhere you can off-load because even though you have therapy you're always terrified in case you say the wrong thing," she admits. "It makes you stronger for going home and dealing with what you have to.

"My husband and I have managed to stay together but I know plenty who have split up. It was the family therapy at Rhodes Farm which helped us and pulled us together. You feel like your whole life is turned inside out and that you've done something wrong, but really no parents are perfect. When your kid's wasting away in front of you, you don't need anybody to start criticising because you're already suffering enough."

Zoe eventually conquered her illness after a second stay at Rhodes Farm. Despite her disrupted school life, the determined youngster went on to achieve ten GCSEs and A-levels in biology, sociology and business studies. She and her family were delighted when she won a place at York University to study psychology last year and she is loving university life.

The illness has left her with some loss of bone mass and her periods stopped for two years, but there appears to have been no lasting physical damage. But she understands the illness may come back to haunt her.

"Everyone thinks that once you come out of hospital then you're cured. But once you have an eating problem, you never actually get over it, you just learn to control it," she says.

"It will always be my weakness, and when times are hard, your weaknesses come to the fore, but as long as I recognise that, I won't let it get on top of me."

* The eating distress service Northern Initiative on Women and Eating can be contacted on (0191) 261 7010.

* The Eating Disorders Association Helpline number is 0845 634 1414.