For four years, West Ham captain Katrina Gorry had an eating disorder which left her in a “really dark place”.

Now the 32-year-old hopes to turn her experience into a positive one and create a more open environment for discussing body image.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Women’s Football Weekly podcast, the Australia international, who had no prior history of disordered eating, said: “It just crept into my life. At the time, I was living in Japan, I had a lot of family things going on off the field, and I felt like the one thing I could control was my food.

“I’ve always been a pretty strong athlete and didn’t really think anything about my weight, but different things started to creep in, whether it was weighing myself before training or before we had breakfast. I found myself trying to have this control over food and it just spiralled.

“I thought, ‘this is just temporary, I’ll be able to get through it’, but four years went past, and I found myself in a really dark place to the point where I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t want to go to training, I didn’t want to get out of bed.”