I was always the ‘funny fat friend’ in my 20s so I started taking cocaine to lose weight. I just wanted men to like me – but it almost cost me everything

Heidi Anderson woke up with a pounding headache, messy hair and makeup smeared across her face.

She pushed herself to her feet and groaned as she took in the trail of destruction she had left through her London share house after arriving home a few hours earlier.

The dress she wore the night before was thrown on a chair, the heels were in random places and her purse fell out next to the bed.

“What did I do last night?” she thought to herself as she squinted her eyes to adjust to the late morning sun that was now streaming through the unclosed curtains.

This was a typical Sunday for Heidi, a recurring nightmare of self-loathing and crippling anxiety brought on by Friday and Saturday nights of cocaine, alcohol and casual sex.

After moving to Britain from Australia at the age of 21, Heidi was away almost every weekend, repeating the vicious cycle of euphoria, followed by disgust and then regret. All her bad decisions were fueled by cocaine.

For Heidi, who describes herself as the “funny fat girlfriend” during her unhappy 20s, the party drug was a way to attract male attention, control her anxiety and slim down.

But in reality, it caused her weight to fluctuate wildly and sent her down a path of self-destruction.

‘My weeks were full of dieting, feeling bad about myself and trying to erase everything I had done over the weekend. But by Thursday I was getting excited about my weekend plans, and then I was partying from Friday and sometimes into Sunday,” Heidi, now 40, tells me.

For years, she tried to live up to the “lucky, fat girl” persona she developed during school to protect herself from others. But when cocaine was added to the mix, her twenties saw her mental health collapse.

‘I’ve always been loud, it was almost a defense mechanism. “I put on a brave and bold face and told everyone I was doing fine, but inside I hated myself,” she says.

‘Most men in London wanted to sleep with my friends, not me. I hardly ever got attention from men. I was the “funny fat friend,” or so I believed. Men would hang out with me and drink, but they weren’t attracted to me.’

At the same time, cocaine use was common and was seen as a ‘safe’ drug used by supermodels and celebrities.

In Heidi’s case, she turned to cocaine to become a better version of herself, silence her inner critic and finally get some looks from men.

‘In London it was cheaper to do drugs than to drink alcohol. It was the mid-2000s, the world was a very different place: a bag of cocaine cost around £50 ($100) and pills cost £4 ($8). It was wild,” says Heidi.

Friday and Saturday nights were spent partying, meeting new people, sleeping with strangers and forgetting her darkest thoughts.

But cocaine wasn’t the miracle weight loss drug that some ’90s and ’00s models would have you believe. For Heidi, her weight fluctuated drastically due to her lifestyle. She would lose several pounds from her cocaine use one month, then put it all back on the next month, and sometimes she even gained weight.

‘While I was partying, I barely ate. “I lost weight, gained weight like a yo-yo, and had a list of other physical flaws like swollen cheeks and a beer belly,” she says.

To earn a living in busy London, she worked in a bar and then as a tour guide before joining a PR agency. Over the weekend she ruined everything she had made and found herself going off the rails.

‘I’ve done crazy things that I wouldn’t normally do. “I was almost in an orgy and went into a rage on the subway when someone stole my camera full of travel photos,” she admits.

Looking back, Heidi thinks the “self-loathing Sally” voice in her head started after her first kiss in the playground at age 11 or 12, when she had chubby cheeks and was taller than the other girls.

“I was so proud that I had just kissed a boy, but I saw him laughing and heard his friend say, ‘You kissed the fat one,'” she says.

The comment haunted her for years.

She became obsessed with her weight and what others thought of her, and her concerns about her appearance flared every time she looked in the mirror.

‘There was so much going through my mind all the time and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Growing up in an Australian rural town in the 1990s, mental health wasn’t talked about,” Heidi says.

By the time she reached high school, she was so fixated on her weight that she developed an eating disorder. In a cruel twist, boys suddenly became interested, which only exacerbated her body problems as she now associated starving herself with male attention.

‘I went from a size 14, which looked fat and swollen, to a size seven. All the boys wanted to date me. For me it was confirmation,” she says.

Fast forward to her twenties and Heidi was still telling herself the same thing: being thin meant success with men. Although she knew she was funny and had a vibrant personality, she longed to be desired for her looks.

‘All my friends were beautiful and thin and turned heads. While men just wanted to be friends with me,” she says.

Heidi returned to Australia in 2009 and was diagnosed with chronic anxiety. The following year she began her radio career in Bunbury, Western Australia, but continued to struggle with low self-esteem.

Radio can be a tough job for someone who is insecure. In her book “Drunk On Confidence,” she recalled the first time a listener mocked her weight: one The man called to say she was ‘fat and not funny at all’ and to get off his radio.

In 2013, Heidi’s profile grew when she took part in Big Brother, which led to a radio appearance in a much larger market, Perth. But as her career took off, she hit rock bottom mentally, as her anxiety about her weight worsened.

Heidi had to drag herself out of bed to go to work every morning, and felt a palpable sense of relief when she got home and collapsed on the couch..

During her workday, she often had to run to the bathroom to avoid having a panic attack during a panic attack three-minute song, before she gathered herself to speak again.

‘I had to take Valium and my anxiety got so bad I felt trapped in my own body. Then my boss at the time asked if I wanted to talk about it on the air,” says Heidi.

‘At first I thought it was a crazy idea, but then decided to do it. I explained that every patient feels something different and that we all experience a range of different symptoms.

‘I took a leap of faith and confessed my fear live to 500,000 people.’

Her story reached more than two million people online.

Today, Heidi is a successful keynote speaker, author and mother.

Despite her chaotic younger years, she is grateful to have experienced it because it led to her meeting her current husband. He was one of the men she met during her wild years in London, but they didn’t start dating seriously until five years later, when fate brought them together at a friend’s 30th birthday party..

For Heidi, her marriage is a shining example that even in the darkest days there is always a glimmer of hope on the horizon.