In this powerful conversation, Kim Morrison sits down with Millie Thomas, an eating disorder recovery coach, to share Millie’s raw and deeply personal story of surviving and fully recovering from a 15 year battle with anorexia nervosa.
Millie takes us back to her teenage years in Auckland, where perfectionism, control, and pressure became fertile ground for the illness. Despite academic achievement and outward success, she describes the inner torment, the escalating compulsions, and the heartbreaking moment at 27 when her doctor asked her to decide whether she wanted to live or die. A turning point came through unconventional but deeply human support including work with Silky, an NLP practitioner, who helped Millie reframe the disorder as a set of changeable behaviours and begin the courageous climb back to life.
Kim and Millie explore the reality that eating disorders are biopsychosocial illnesses that infiltrate every corner of a person’s world and profoundly affect families too. Millie speaks candidly about the impact on her parents and brother, the role of hope, and why recovery requires compassion and boundaries. Together they unpack how the eating disorder “voice” distorts language and meaning, why “just eat” is not only unhelpful but misunderstands the terror response, and how the recovery journey can feel chaotic while actually being a reclaiming of control.
Millie also shares how her lived experience fuelled her mission: moving to the Sunshine Coast, contributing to broader support pathways (including involvement in residential recovery approaches), and building her private practice HealED, supporting clients worldwide. The episode closes with practical insight for carers and loved ones, and introduces Millie’s Hope & Healing Affirmation Cards. A purpose built resource designed specifically to support eating disorder recovery with grounded, relevant language.
Millie Thomas is a Carolyn Costin Institute Certified Eating Disorder Recovery Coach and a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner. She battled Anorexia Nervosa for 15 years and very nearly lost her life to the illness. She was given up on by her treatment team and told to consider palliative care options. Her miraculous recovery was a catalyst for a complete career change. She left her hometown of Auckland, New Zealand and moved to her ‘happy place’ – the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Where she became determined to use her lived experience to help bring eating disorders out of the shadows and into the light. She dedicates her time to eating disorder advocacy and eating disorder recovery coaching. She helps clients around the world to gain freedom from their eating disorders and reclaim their lives.
Millie has her private practice HealED and for several years she also worked with Sunshine Coast based charity endED where she was involved in numerous projects including the establishment of Australia’s first residential eating disorders facility ‘Wandi Nerida’.
She believes that no matter how long or how hard someone’s journey with an eating disorder has been full recovery is always possible; she is living proof of that.
Her definition of Self Love is: Self-love, for me, is giving myself grace while holding hope. Never giving up on myself and choosing to live, not just exist.
Her favourite quote is from: Ralph Waldo Emerson- To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Real success in life is being the kind of person who makes others feel safe enough to be themselves — exactly as they are.
HealED Founder
Eating Disorder Recovery Coach
Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner
+61 434 143 834
Website: www.healed.net.au
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healedrecoverycoach
Instagram: www.instagram.com/healedrecoverycoach
I had a beautiful childhood with a wonderful, beautiful, and loving family.
Up until then I had no conception about my body other than what it allowed me to do.
I had all personality characteristics that predisposed someone to anorexia.
I still had all the thoughts, I had the same brain but different body.
I felt I had to pretend that I was doing well.
I was existing but not truly living.
You might be weight restored but you actually need to be heart restored.
Perfectionism can look like an asset, but at that point in my life it was a liability. It was toxic. The need to always do better, it is never enough.
I looked happy in all the photos from Ibiza and France, but I was miserable. I was living with a demon in my head.
My GP looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘I need you to decide whether you want to live or you want to die because I need to know how to proceed with how we care for you.
There was no peace, every single thing that I did I was punished or tortured for.
The only way I could I see myself being at peace was being above the world looking down and up from a far.
I had vicious voices in my head telling me these horrible things are going to happen if you don’t do this. It is like another force that I can’t even describe.
Silky told me, you don’t have an eating disorder. It is something you do, a behaviour that has become a habit and behaviours can be changed. This was the moment when I thought she is right.
It was a real sense of empowerment.
I thought, if I die now, I will never know what it’s like to live.
I felt I owed it to myself to give life a go. If I really hated it that much, on the other side I could always go back. It was the most excruciating, tortuous time of my life.
It brought me to my knees, but it also opened the world back up to me.
I put one foot in front of the other every single day and I did it. I gained the weight, and I moved on with my life.
Recovery felt like standing on the edge of a cliff . Terrifying, unknown, but also strangely liberating.
I talk about the 3 C’s which is conscious, consistent and commitment. My eating disorder was consciously, consistently committed to ruining my life hence I had to be consciously, consistently committed to reclaiming my life back.
I often thought to myself as I was kicking and screaming on the floor in the middle of recovery “Why me?” What is the reason for this. This was the reason. I was here to use my story and turn my pain into my purpose and create change.
Those 15 years were a living hell but without them, I wouldn’t be here now, helping people find freedom, and for that I am forever grateful.
People can get well. It is not something you have to battle for the rest of your life with the right support.
I knew lived experience was gold. It is the lived experience that helps me to help my clients in a compassionate way.
Everything I do now comes from having been there. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter when you have lived it.
There was a period where my brother disowned me and said, ‘If you don’t get rid of this illness, I’m out”. Even then, all I cared about was being skinny. I didn’t care if I lost my brother.
I was so far down the rabbit hole that it was like water off a duck’s back and that still frightens me to this day.
When I think about the possibility that I may never have been an Auntie that breaks my heart.
Unless you have lived it as a family, you cannot even begin to imagine how wild that ride is.
Eating disorders prey on perfectionism. That black and white thinking of ‘you must do this’ or something terrible will happen.
The voice told me every single day, if you do XYZ, you will be happy for the rest of your life.
I fell for that spell. Hook, line and sinker. That if I had the perfect body, everything else would fall into place.
You think you are in control, but really the eating disorder is in the driver’s seat.
Recovery feels like losing control completely but it is actually you taking the control back.
As morbid as it sounds, the eating disorder’s goal is to kill you. That is its motive.
One of the most important things is to always hold hope.
Approach it with love, compassion and non judgement but also have boundaries and encourage them to reach for a different life.
Every single time you ask them to be included, they realise they still matter in the world.
Connection is key.
There was not one aspect of my life that was not affected by my eating disorder.
If you can help someone get out of their head and into their heart, piece by piece, bit by bit, that is what helps them keep going.
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