Can a sponsored weight-gain challenge save the
life of long-term anorexic Lizzie Grimaldi? Christa D'Souza reports
Whenever former ballet dancer Lizzie Grimaldi, 36, sees an
anorexic walking down the street, her impulse is always the same. | |  | | Lizzie Grimaldi: 'As a teenage ballerina,
everyone was on a silly regime' |
"I want to grab her by the shoulders and say,
'Can't you see what you are doing to yourself? Can't
you see that skinny like that is unsexy? That men find it absolutely repulsive'?" It is a wintry afternoon and we are sitting in the spotless
pied-à-terre Grimaldi shares with her husband, the society doctor
Barry Grimaldi, atop his Harley Street consulting rooms. As is
jarringly obvious from the moment we meet, Grimaldi is a chronic
anorexic. Though undeniably attractive, with her corn-blonde bob and
baby-blue eyes, her looks are marred by the trademark signs of the
disease: the skin pulled over the skull-like features, the
stalk-thin neck and the ''lollipop" head. "Yeah, well," she says with a weary shrug, "us
ex-dancers, we've all got these silly little heads,
haven't we? There's something about the dancing profession
that semi-stunts your growth. That, or people like me are inexorably
drawn to it. Who knows whether it is cause or effect…?" And so it has been, on and off, for Grimaldi, a former dancer with
the London City Ballet, for the past 20 years. As a functioning
''tardive anorexic" (the name given to adult
sufferers, who account for an estimated one in 10 of the 160,000
suffering from the disease nationwide), she gets by on eating as
little as possible to live. She is permanently cold, weak and depressed (starvation depletes
serotonin levels), sleeps with a cushion between her knees, and
pretends to everyone "that I've had the forkful of
linguine when I've only had the strand". Until, that is, one point last winter when she got on the scales
at the surgery near the large country house outside Banbury where
she and her husband spend their weekends. "Six stone I could just about rationalise [she is 5ft 6in],
but when I got into five-stone territory, I just knew it had become
insanity," she says, rearranging her skeletal, child-like frame
in her chair. She is clad in Armani, as the 24in waist jeans she
would have liked to have worn now fall off her. "I was deeply
unhappy, my marriage was disintegrating. I could not go on." And so it was that last November she decided to go on a
"pounds (lb) for pounds (£)" sponsored charity weight
gain. For every pound in weight Grimaldi puts on, she hopes to raise
£1,000 for the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted, where her
father died of a brain tumour three years ago. By this time next year, she hopes to have put on a stone and a
half to reach "the weight people leave me alone at" - 7st
4lb. And even though during the blow-out Christmas and New Year period,
she put on less than a pound - a mere 15 ounces - she is convinced
she will do it. "I've managed to put weight on before,
during treatment [last year at The Priory], but each time I've
lost it all - and more - afterwards. But now there are other people
who'll be let down if I fail, it makes it more do-able. For me,
this may be the turning point." One must fervently hope so. Grimaldi, whose father was an oil
executive, her mother a trim housewife and "the only woman I
know who has never been on a diet" has been hospitalised twice
with anorexia, and is convinced it is her dancing background that
brought on the disease. "It all started when I left home for
London and got headhunted by the English National Ballet school." At the age of 16, Grimaldi was a "healthy"
seven-and-a-half stone - "perhaps a little less" - but the
competition to be that bit lighter was always fierce. "We got
weighed weekly and I remember one fellow dancer saying to me,
'You could lose a kilo', and another that 'Oh, you
could tone up a bit'. From then on, all I ate were apples and
dry cereal, refusing to cook anything because the hostel kitchenette
was so vile. It wasn't such a weird thing for a teenage
ballerina - everybody was on some sort of silly regime. In fact, I
remember this one dancer, a severe bulimic, actually looked up to me
for having such discipline." Her deeply ingrained need for things to be ''right"
has long tormented other parts of Grimaldi's life. "Ever
since I was a little girl, I had to touch things such as door-knobs
and banisters with both hands before they were 'safe' - a
bit like the way one doesn't step on the cracks of a pavement.
Most people lose that when they become adults but I didn't, and
when my weight goes down, those OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder]
tendencies tend to get worse. Grimaldi met her husband, who is 25 years her senior, when
performing The Nutcracker with the London Festival Ballet at the age
of 12. "I suffered a groin injury and he was the company
doctor," she giggles girlishly, "and though I didn't
realise it I think I probably fell in love with him then." | 
