Kate Reid is known as ‘the queen of croissants’. She was once terrified of food.

Content warning: The following deals with eating disorders, which may be triggering for some readers.

The thing about anorexia, Kate Reid says, is that it well and truly had her before she knew she had it.

The Melbourne baker, who founded the famed Lune Croissanterie, says the disease snuck up on her, then inhabited her so completely that she couldn't see it.

She couldn't see it when her loved ones expressed concern about her obsession with calories and exercise. She couldn't see it when she looked in the mirror at her emaciated figure. She couldn't even see it in 2008 when doctors delivered the diagnosis.

Watch: We speak to a mother and daughter about the possibility of anorexia being genetic. Post continues after video.

Now, more than a decade on, Kate is recovered. Not only can she see the anorexia and what it did to her, she wants to show you.

It all started with the collapse of her dream career.

As a young engineer, working in Formula 1 seemed like the pinnacle to Kate Reid. And in her mid-20s, she reached it.

Image: Instagram @ms.lune.

But just 18 months into her role as an aerodynamicist for the legendary British racing team Williams F1, Kate came to accept she wasn't suited to the job — one she'd worked toward "with single-minded determination" for close to a decade, one she'd moved to the other side of the world for.

"I worked 16 to 18 hours a day behind a computer, often going through a whole day without having conversation with people," she told Mamamia's No Filter podcast. "They didn't really even offer the opportunity for us all to get together and watch races. So it was very much compartmentalised into: 'You're responsible for this part of the car, and you're just going to put your head down and do that.'"

Her salary in this glamorous, multi-billion dollar sport? £13,000, or roughly AU$24,300.

Dissatisfied with her career, missing friends and family, and with the subtle signs of depression looming, Kate joined a gym.

It started with a six-week programme. The kind that promises you'll get fit, lose a bit of weight, feel healthier. The first week, Kate was weighed and measured, and had her cardio fitness tested. She was also given a leaflet with rudimentary information about food and calories.

As an engineer, someone who thrived on achieving measurable results, it was a seductive formula.

She was soon working out several days a week and closely monitoring her food. She developed a set of rules for herself around eating that, when she later catalogued them, spanned four-and-a-half A4 pages.

Prior to this, Kate had never been on a diet, nor owned a set of bathroom scales.

"I wouldn't eat out anymore. I wouldn't go to restaurants because God knows what they'd cooked the food in," she said. "As soon as that control was taken out of my hands, I'd freak out."

Kate said her partner grew concerned. He started packing food for her to take to work, and requesting that they eat lunch together. Most of it ended up in the bin.

Colleagues noticed too. Her concentration and memory lapsed, and she was making mistakes.

"My whole world was so narrow. All I cared about was the eating and the exercise and everything else was just superfluous to that… The number on the scales just had to be less every day," she said.

"Dad told me that when I was at my worst, I wouldn't even look before I crossed the road. I was singularly focused on the movement and the exercise."

Yet Kate struggled to see the problem.

"In my head, every morning that I stood on the scales and I was a bit lighter, I was achieving what I'd set out to achieve. So that was a win for me. But everyone else was seeing it as a negative," she said.

She also developed body dysmorphia, and would fixate on what she believed to be excess fat on her starving frame.

"I remember going to my auntie's house and sitting there and clenching my stick-thin legs as tight as I could, because I couldn't bear how much my thighs were spreading," she said.

Anorexia nervosa is a serious eating disorder and mental health condition characterised by restrictive eating that prevents the person from being able to maintain a healthy weight. According to The Butterfly Foundation, it predominantly affects girls and women, and the causes include genetic predisposition as well as a combination of environmental, social and cultural factors.

"For some people, restricting their food and weight can be a way of controlling areas of life that feel out of their control and their body image can come to define their entire sense of self worth," the organisation states.

"Restrictive dieting and excessive exercise can be contributing factors to the onset of anorexia."

The condition can lead to significant physical and mental health problems, some of which can be life-threatening. But with quality intervention, recovery is entirely possible. Kate is proof of that.

For her (ironically enough), it started with baking.

It was a hobby at first. She was attracted to the science of it all. How the inedible, raw ingredients would go into an oven and, through a series of chemical reactions, emerge as something entirely different — and far, far more delicious — than the sum of those parts.

But it was tied up in her anorexia, too. Baked goods were the foods Kate most obsessed over, the ones that tortured her most, and making them was a means of testing her self-control.

After leaving her Formula 1 career and returning to Australia for the sake of her health in 2008, Kate took jobs as a baker.

"There was just slowly, very fractionally, every day, less and less room in my head for my brain to obsess over the eating disorder," she said. "I'd show up to work and there'd be a prep list and I'd have to make these 20 things by the end of the day."

When Kate ultimately launched Lune in 2012, after completing an apprenticeship at the famous Parisian boulangerie Du Pain et des Idées, that only compounded. Her unhealthy obsession with, and fear of, food began to transform into love. She had a purpose again, beyond chasing an ever-lower number on the scales.

Her business — which The New York Times said produces croissants that "may be the finest you will find anywhere in the world" — was healing her.

"I dropped the rules," she said. "Lune had its own rules, like 'the bills need to be paid by this day', and 'the croissants need to be delivered by this time'. And so my life was controlled by an external set of rules, not internal to my body anymore."

Therapy played a significant role in Kate's recovery, as did the support of family and friends. But ultimately she had to draw on her own determination.

"I don't ever, ever want to be anorexic again. Because it was hell. You don't have a life. You can't enjoy time with friends or family. You can't go out and have a beautiful meal. You're not free. You're trapped in the jail that is your own head. There is nothing fun about it," she said.

"I get so much joy from eating now, then I imagine what it would be like to go back and not let myself have that joy. And I can't imagine that."

She shares her story in the hope that she can serve as an example of someone who has made it "out the other end" of anorexia.

"You're never going to look at something and not know the calories in it. You can't go back to that blissful, pre-morbid way of thinking," she said. "But you can have an amazing life after it. And you can do incredible things. And you can channel that stubbornness and determination that got you into the eating disorder into something far more spectacular."

Keen to learn more about Kate Reid's story? Listen to No Filter below.

If you or someone you know is living with an eating disorder, support is available via The Butterfly Foundation. Call 1800 33 4673 or visit their website to chat online.

Feature Image credit: Bianca Tuckwell.