Roma, 17 Apr. (askanews) – She ended up in hospital a few weeks after her husband’s victory in the Belgian elections in 2024. Almost two years later, Veerle Hegge, wife of Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Weverhe told France Presse in an interview why he chose to make publishes her struggle against anorexia in a book: to push people to speak up and ask for help.
The 53-year-old mother of 4, speaking in her home in Antwerp, said she had reached the limit, and The weight of silencethis is the title of his book, focuses mainly on the months spent in hospital to get back on his feet.
Belgium, first lady Veerle Hegge talks about her fight against anorexia
“If you really need 24/7 monitoring and you have to do an ECG, and then you’re told: your parameters are such that your heart could stop at any moment, then you have two options. Maybe some people give up and say: Well, that’s it, it’s over”; or, in my case, I never had the intention or will to die. I really never wanted to die. So I thought: ugh, this is not good. And I also saw Bart’s desperation and the children’s sadness,” he said.
From compliments on your fitness to hospitalization for anorexia
Hegge talks openly in the book about her loneliness and the guilt she felt for being away from home; she talks about how her husband seemed “helpless” in the face of her experience, thanking him for staying by her side and how when she started losing weight, at first everyone complimented her on her physical shape. “After that you start to get a little too thin. But the more you let the eating disorder overwhelm you, the deeper you get into it, the harder it becomes to get out of it. You actually keep thinking that you can turn it around on your own, that you’ll cure yourself. And you keep believing until the end, until it’s really too late,” she says.
Talking about eating disorders like AIDS in the 80s: to break the taboo
In the book there is her difficult childhood with a depressed mother, and there is the abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of an older boy for several years. A “trauma”, he said, repressed for years. And on the decision to write, he explained: “Mental illness, therefore also eating disorders, is still surrounded by taboos. People find it difficult to talk about it. It’s something that makes people uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, even just talking about it. In contrast, a somatic disease is much more accessible. And that’s why there really needs to be people trying to overcome this. Just as happened with diseases such as AIDS and cancer decades ago.”
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