Adam Rickitt has opened up about suffering from mental illness and an eating disorder. During Mental Health Awareness Week the former soap star spoke to Lorraine Kelly about how he developed an eating disorder during his teenage years. After a sports injury, Adam was working hard to get back to fitness. That’s when it started. He explained: “I was eating to try and keep my weight up so I could get back training and literally, I’d just, without realising, been eating and eating and eating for two hours, stood up and was just sick on the spot.” Adam played Nick Tilsley in Coronation Street (image via ITV). He added: “Once you get on that destructive road, it just snowballs and snowballs and snowballs and by the end of it, 18 months later, I was setting my alarm for six o’clock in the morning so I could start eating and bingeing and I was throwing up up to 30 times a day. “It becomes so secret… I was so embarrassed because I had no reason to be feeling like this so it was even worse because I knew I was punishing my parents and I knew everyone knew as well.” The actor-turned-singer with his wife Katy (image via Twitter). Even during his years on Coronation Street, he struggled: “Even if I was doing something like Coronation Street it’s this big successful TV show, I wasn’t happy… Literally for 12 years of acting I never actually enjoyed one part of it because I was so worried about what the next step was.” Adam finished off by telling host Lorraine that it wasn’t until his 30th birthday that he finally felt he was “cured.” He explained that he is in a much better place now and that his wife, Good Morning Britain’s Katy Rickitt, has been a big part of that.