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Obsessed dieter loses life to drug ordered online
A woman desperate to lose weight poisoned herself with banned slimming pills she bought over the internet.
- By Rashid Razaq, Evening Standard
- Published: 00:15 June 29, 2008
London: A woman desperate to lose weight poisoned herself with banned slimming pills she bought over the internet.
Selena Walrond, 26, died five days after starting the course of the drug DNP, which was also used by bodybuilders and as a pesticide.
A Croydon inquest heard how she became so obsessed with losing weight she took a gram of the drug - more than five times the amount used by the most extreme bodybuilders - the day before she died.
Short for dinitrophenol, DNP causes the taker's temperature to rocket and boosts the metabolic rate by interfering with cell respiration. By inhibiting cells' ability to breathe, metabolism is increased - meaning fat is burned rapidly.
Walrond, who weighed around 95kg and was 1.60 metres tall, was found by her mother, Anjennis, in a cold bath as she desperately tried to cool down after the drug sent her temperature soaring.
She was taken to hospital but suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
Croydon coroner's court heard how Walrond had in recent years become so worried about her shape she developed a fear of being seen in public.
The otherwise normal, lively girl had struggled with her weight throughout her twenties. Her family said she scoured the internet for treatments and eventually found a Chinese website selling the DNP pills. Miss Walrond's sister Asha, 30, a former school administrator, said her self-esteem had been badly damaged by her weight.
She said, "Her weight used to embarrass her and she was not confident enough to leave the house sometimes.
"Selena was quite a chubby baby. She lost all the weight, but when she got to about 21 she started to put it on again. She must have put on about five or six stone over five years."
Her mother took her daughter to hospital after finding her in the bath "sweating, agitated and running a fever" on 19 August last year. Mrs Walrond said: "Selena's life has been cruelly snatched away, all because she was desperate to lose weight.
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