'IT'S THE FIRST TIME I WASN'T THINKING ABOUT MYSELF' ROZ PURCELL SAYS SISTER'S CANCER HELPED HER FIGHT EATING DISORDER

Roz Purcell has bravely spoken out about how it was her sister Rachel's cancer diagnosis that finally motivated her to battle the eating disorder that had consumed her life.

The former Miss Universe Ireland, 33, spoke out about how the shock of her sister being diagnosed with leukaemia was a 'changing moment' in her battle with anorexia and binge eating.

'It was probably the first time... that I wasn't thinking of myself,' Roz said. 'And I feel embarrassed to say that it took me by the age of 25 to not be so consumed by myself but that is part of an eating disorder.'

Roz said her eating disorder was kicked up a gear after she felt like a failure for giving up on her dream to model in America, coupled with the rise of social media and being subjected to pictures of herself where her weight had fluctuated.

The model was speaking on Mary McAleese and Mary Kennedy on the Changing Times podcast and revealed how during her modelling career, she had found herself not eating for days and binging and purging.

She revealed the ways her weight loss affected her health, her period stopped and she even started having heart palpitations.

Roz says that she first sought help during an incident on holiday where her sister burst into her room and told her to 'cop on.'

It was the first time she says that she realised that other people had noticed that something was wrong.

Looking back now she admitted that she probably wasn't the nicest back then because she her whole world revolved around food.

Roz said: 'I feel really terrible for the people who were with me doing things because I kind of took the fun out of everything.

'I didn't mean to do that, but everything revolved around food and what weight I was. So if I was having a bad day, I took it out on everything around me.'

She continued: 'It must have been horrific to be in a relationship with me because I was so caught up in hating myself that I had very little room or very little space in my head to be happy.'

After the incident on holidays she says she still wasn't actually ready to seek help but went along with it to tick a box for others despite having no intention to change her ways.

However, that finally changed when her sister Rachel became sick with cancer.

Roz said: 'My own internal worries were gone and I was just worried about her, and then going to appointments with her over the coming months and kind of finding out what type of leukaemia she has.'

In doing so, Roz learned about body functuality and how her sister's body was fighting the cancer which made her realise how much she had been punishing her own body for years.

She said: 'It was just a big changing moment for me, being like, I am literally doing the worst thing possible for my body.'

'That really kind of made me go, "Oh actually I do want to get better. I don't want to waste any more time because I don't know when my time is going to be up."