I was only seven when my father said I was too fat to carry. His constant cruel jibes about my weight have ruined my life and driven me to anorexia... and my mother's lack of support has made it even worse

When I got my first boyfriend at the age of 15 I did everything in my power to keep him away from my sister Isabelle, who was two years older than me. Not because I thought she wouldn't like him – he was lovely – but because she was slimmer than me. I thought he'd take one look and see me for the fat and ugly girl I was by comparison. The truth was – and still is, I suppose – that I think all men value slimmer women above bigger ones.

And the person who taught me that is my father. So often we hear about women who have challenging relationships with their food and weight because of what they have learned from their mother. It's all the fault of Boomer and Generation X women, we're told – the mums now in their 50s, 60s and 70s – who spent their youth on the Atkins or the cabbage soup diet and then transferred their neuroses to their daughters.

But my case was different – and perhaps even more damaging. For the relentless comments about my weight made by my father taught me not only to judge myself, but that men would constantly judge me too. His insidious comparisons and cruel jibes created a world in which I was never good enough because I was never 'slim enough'. Eighteen months after my diagnosis I felt confident enough to reach for a croissant. Dad told me not to eat it - and handed it to my sister, writes Holly Hughes (file image).

Looking back now, at 26, I can see that his behaviour was nothing short of monstrous. My first memory of it was at the age of seven on a family day out. Dad had lifted Isabelle, then nine, onto his shoulders to get a better look at some horses in a field and I wanted a go too. 'Please, Daddy, it's my turn now!'. 'No Holly, she's as light as a feather but you're far too fat,' he replied. Even then, amidst my confusion at the unfairness of it, I looked down at my tummy to see if I really was too heavy for my tall, strong dad.

Not that it matters, but I wasn't. Isabelle and I are quite different: I'm blonde, she's darker-haired, for example, and she's always had willowy limbs. I have what you'd call a normal, slim frame, if 'bigger' than her. At most I had a bit of puppy fat, but no doctor or health visitor would have looked at me and thought I needed to lose weight. Not ever. But Dad? He judged me all the time. 'You're eating like a pig, Holly,' he'd remark over dinner, while I was still in primary school. Isabelle was the 'skinny minnie' while I was the 'squishy' one.

Aged 11, I recall being desperate to wear a sparkly dress to our primary school leavers' party, just as all my friends were planning to do. But dad told me my legs weren't slim 'like your sister's', so I should just wear trousers instead. I was the only one in them at the party. My father was a hugely successful business executive – an intelligent, modern-seeming man – and yet in his world women's value lay solely in their appearance.

Indeed, appearances meant everything to him: driving the right luxury car, wearing the right sharp-cut suits, having the 'perfect' family around him. He never applied the same exacting standards to himself, of course, and was always a couple of stone overweight. Meanwhile, all women were categorised by size: his nicknames for the women in his daily life included Fat Anna from the village pub and Big Carol from the office.

It was an obsession. We couldn't sit through a film without him commenting on women's figures. Watching La La Land as a family, he picked apart the group of exceptionally thin young women Emma Stone lives with at the start: 'Oh that one needs to lose at least a stone if she thinks she's going to make it in Hollywood…'. His mother was the same. Of course this perpetuates the notion that it's all women's fault, but I do wonder if his compulsive need to judge women came from her.

Whenever she visited, she'd ask for a ballet show from my slip-of-a-thing sister and simultaneously comment that 'perhaps some exercise would slim Holly down?' I'd pinch the flesh on my tummy and hate it. Mum was incredibly slender as a younger woman. But when she gave up her own career as a legal secretary to look after us, she began to put a few pounds on, which of course Dad didn't like. The relentless comments about my weight made by my father taught me not only to judge myself, but that men would constantly judge me too, says Holly (file image).

'She's gained weight,' he'd tell people in front of her, and 'she doesn't look like she used to'. How she put up with it – and still does – I have no idea. 'Don't listen to him, he's just a grumpy old man,' she'd occasionally tell me in private – but she didn't once stand up for me in front of him. Often, I'd run down to the wooden playhouse at the bottom of the garden at our house in Surrey and cry where they couldn't see me.