As told to the Sunday Sun newspaper ...

As a build up to the North East Skinny Dip 2013, I was interviewed by a reporter from local North East paper, the 'Sunday Sun.'  The article appeared in yesterday's paper (see photos below) ... this is the article as written by the reporter, Brian Daniel and printed in the Sunday Sun, 22nd September 2013.


"A NORTH woman will today notch up an important milestone in her recovery from eating disorders when she gets her kit off at a mass skinny dip.

Sharon Cox, 40, from North Shields, is taking part in the North East Skinny Dip 2013 at Druridge Bay Country Park in Northumberland.

The event, successfully held for the first time in 2012 and arranged to coincide with the autumn equinox, will see hundreds of men and women bare all and take a sunrise dip in the cold North Sea.

Participants will be raising money for the Mind mental health charity as well as event supporters, the National Trust, and could play their part in breaking the world record for the world's biggest skinny dip.

But for Sharon, [of North Shields], the event will be a key moment in her life - world record or not.

At the age of 15 she developed anorexia, a disorder she suffered from until she was 17.

"I probably got down to around 7 stone which, probably for my height at that age, was about two stone underweight."

Sharon then began to suffer from bulimia, a disorder which would plague her until she reached 30.

"Some periods I would be bingeing and vomitting quite often."

Sharon's weight would vary from to to 11-and-a-half stone.

In 1999, at the age of 27, Sharon began training to be become a counsellor, having attended counselling for her bulimia.

She eventually opened her own private practice, helping people principally with eating disorders and working at GP surgeries with those suffering from other mental health problems.

For the last six years, she has been studying a PhD at York St John University part time on the therapist's experiences of working with people with eating disorders.

The counsellor training and practice and the work she has done for the PhD, have helped Sharon - a steady 10 stone for the last few years - put her disorders behind her.

And today, enjoying life and her body unlike so many years when she did not, she will get her kit off at the skinny dip, the first time she - like most of us - will have done such a thing in public.

She said, "In the last 10 years I have not felt especially confident in my body.

It is only through my PhD that I have found a way to accept my own body and to feel that sense of body acceptance which allow me to do the skinny dip.

I would never have dreamed of doing it even a couple of years ago!

This is the pinnacle both of recovery and of my PhD - it feels a real high point in both of those."

Sharon is dreading feelings the icy water against her skin though, saying, "I am more worried about the cold than the nakedness!"

She is hoping to raise hundreds of pounds for Mind."

I still aim to find the time to write in more detail about my journey from eating disorders to skinny dipping ...