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Candace Cameron Bure
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Candace Cameron Bure said she developed an eating disorder after her Full House days. While she had a healthy body image growing up, that changed after moving to Montreal for her husband’s hockey career, where she turned to food for comfort when he was out of town during the season. “It became a very destructive relationship, and it was one that really caught me off guard,” she said at a panel in 2016. “I got into a cycle of binge-eating and feeling such guilt and shame for that, that I would start purging. And without even knowing, it soon just took over to a point where you feel such a loss of control. It was like getting on a moving train that was moving at 100 miles an hour, and I couldn’t get off of it and I didn’t know how.”
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Jane Fonda
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Jane Fonda dealt with an eating disorder for decades, but she kept her bulimia a secret from the world. “I wasn’t very happy from, I would say, puberty to 50? It took me a long time. It was in my 40s, and if you suffer from bulimia, the older you get, the worse it gets. It takes longer to recover from a bout,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in a 2011 interview. “I had to make a choice: I live or I die,” and she said she decided to “fill that empty space with something.”
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3
Lady Gaga
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When speaking at an event in 2012, Lady Gaga opened up about her struggles with eating disorders. “I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I’m not that confident,” she said.“I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.” At one point, her bulimia started to affect her singing. “It made my voice bad, so I had to stop.”
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4
Shawn Johnson East
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Even Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson has had her share of body struggles. At one point, she cut down to eating just 700 calories a day. “I was always the very strong, powerful, muscly, bulky gymnast and I felt like people always wanted me to be thinner and lighter and leaner. And as a 12-year-old, the only way I really understood how to achieve that was to eat less and restrict myself. I remember kind of obsessing over it,” she told People in 2015. “I went as far as literally not eating any carbs. I wouldn’t allow myself to eat a single noodle of soup. It got to the point where my body was shutting down.”
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5
Taylor Swift
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Taylor Swift shared a lot in her new Netflix documentary Miss Americana—most notably an eating disorder she kept hidden from the world that was often triggered by paparazzi pictures or negative comments about her body. “I thought I was just supposed to feel like I was gonna pass out at the end of a show or in the middle of it. Now I realize, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel it, which is a really good revelation because I’m a lot happier with who I am I don’t care as much if somebody points out that I have gained weight,” she said. “The fact that I’m a size 6 instead of a size 00—that wasn’t how my body was supposed to be. I just didn’t really understand that at the time.”
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Jessica Alba
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During a panel at the In Goop Health wellness summit in 2019, Jessica Alba opened up about struggling with an eating disorder in the past—something she used to try and banish her curves that constantly caused her to be preyed upon by men. “I was meant to feel ashamed if I tempted men,” she said. “Then I stopped eating a lot when I became an actress. I made myself look more like a boy so I wouldn’t get as much attention.”
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Demi Lovato
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Demi Lovato shared that food is the biggest challenge in her life in her 2017 YouTube documentary, Simply Complicated. The singer revealed she first started binging when she was only 8 years old, and although she went three years without purging while she was dating a longtime boyfriend, that changed immediately after their relationship ended. “When we broke up, that’s one of the first things I did,” she said. “The less I have to think about food, the easier it is to go about having a normal life and I don’t want to let anybody down so when I do have moments when I slip up, I feel very ashamed. And when I feel lonely, my heart feels hungry and I end up binging.”
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Gabourey Sidibe
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Actress Gabourey Sidibe opened up about her eating disorder in her 2017 memoir, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare. In it, she shared that she had struggled with bulimia. “Often, when I was too sad to stop crying, I drank a glass of water and ate a slice of bread, and then I threw it up,” Sidibe writes. “After I did, I wasn’t as sad anymore; I finally relaxed. So I never ate anything, until I wanted to throw up—and only when I did could I distract myself from whatever thought was swirling around my head.”
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Katie Couric
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Katie Couric has spoken with many stars on their internal battles, and while she was on-air in 2012, she opened up about one she had herself. “I wrestled with bulimia all through college and for two years after that,” she shared with Lovato while interviewing her, per Glamour. “I know this rigidity, this feeling that if you eat one thing that’s wrong, you’re full of self-loathing and then you punish yourself, whether it’s one cookie or a stick of gum that isn’t sugarless, that I would sometimes beat myself up for that. How do you have a healthy relationship with food, and say, ‘You know what, I can have one cookie and it’s OK?’ That is such a huge thing for people who wrestle with this.”
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Paula Abdul
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Paula Abdul had an eating disorder for years, and it started at 16 years old when she made herself throw up after dinner with friends—something she knew they did all the time. “No one thought it was bad. Once I tried it, I felt it was an amazing way to control my weight,” she told People in 1995. What resulted was a cycle of binging and purging, and an unhealthy exercise routine of working out up to four hours a day.
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Stacy London
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In her early 20s, Stacy London—the style icon behind the hit show What Not to Wear—dealt with both anorexia and compulsive overeating. “I felt like I’d never had a serious boyfriend and I really wanted to be attractive,” she told People in 2012. At one point, she was just 90 pounds. After getting help, she began binge-eating and doubled her weight before finally letting go of the shame she felt. Then, she was able to get into a healthy mindset and love her body.
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Hilary Duff
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At the peak of the eating disorder Hilary Duff had when she was 17, she weighed just 98 pounds. “I was totally obsessed with everything I put in my mouth. I was way too skinny,” she revealed. “Not cute. And my body wasn’t that healthy—my hands would cramp up a lot because I wasn’t getting the nutrition I needed,” she told Health in 2015. “That constant pressure of wanting something different than I had? I regret that.”
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13
Elton John
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Elton John isn’t ashamed of the problems he’s had in the past; they’ve only made him stronger. He’s overcome many addictions, including an eating disorder. “I was cocaine-addicted. I was an alcoholic. I had a sexual addiction. I was bulimic for six years,” he told The Mirror in 2019. “It was all through being paranoid about my weight but not able to stop eating. So in the end I’d gorge, then make myself sick.”
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Lucy Hale
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Lucy Hale dealt with body image issues in the past, which sparked an eating disorder. “I’ve never really talked about this, but I would go days without eating,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2012. “Or maybe I’d have some fruit and then go to the gym for three hours. I knew I had a problem… It was a gradual process, but I changed myself.” She’s not shy about her past, though. She even fired back at a Twitter troll who told her to “eat a hamburger,” saying although she used to struggle with an eating disorder, she’s now “healthy and happy.”
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15
Kesha
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When Kesha was deep in her eating disorder, she thought “being hungry to the point of feeling almost faint was a positive thing,” she told Vogue in 2015. “The worse it got, the more positive feedback I was getting. Inside I was really unhappy, but outside, people were like, ‘Wow, you look great.’” When her therapist helped her realize how big of a problem it was, she called her mom and went to rehab where she learned how food is a great thing—not something to fear.
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Troian Bellisario
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Troian Bellisario, who starred in Pretty Little Liars, used the eating disorder she had as a teenager as a way to punish herself. “I started self-harming when I was a junior. I would withhold food or withhold going out with my friends, based on how well I did that day in school,” she told Seventeen in 2014. “I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong, so I think I created this bizarre system of checks and balances to create order in my world. But it really backfired.”
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Lily Collins
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Lily Collins has worked really hard on being her healthiest self after suffering from an eating disorder for years, which involved restricting her food intake, binging and purging, and using laxatives and diet pills, she told Shape in 2017. After playing a character battling anorexia in To The Bone, she opened up about her own struggles. “This is the first time I’m talking about it,” she said at the Sundance Film Festival. “It’s something that a lot of young women go through and there’s no shame in it, and this movie is about embracing your past and realizing it’s something that doesn’t define who you are, but it’s about your experiences, surrounding yourself with people that support you, and about surviving and getting through it.”
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18
Portia de Rossi
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Portia de Rossi’s eating disorder began when she started modeling as a pre-teen, and it got so bad that sometimes she was hardly eating anything at all. At one point, she was down to 300 calories a day. “That was my diet. Ever since I was 12 years old, I would starve myself daily and then binge after the job was over. And that was just the diet I returned to every single time I needed to lose weight,” she said on Good Morning America in 2010. “From that age, I learned that what I looked like was more important than what I thought, what I did, and who I was. I think when your self-esteem is based on how you look, you’re always going to be insecure. There’s always a fresher face, a thinner girl.”
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19
Camila Mendes
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In the October 2019 issue of Women’s Health, Riverdale star Camila Mendes opened up about being in recovery from her eating disorder. “I’ve only recently kind of gotten better,” she said. “It’s something that’s still a curse to me. It’s not like that ever goes away.” There is a way she’s battled those demons, though—focusing on her well-being. “Whenever I do feel insecure, I go back to health. What can I do that’s healthy? Health is what’s important, not appearance. That mentality is what takes me out of the insecure, anxious thoughts.”
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20
Zayn Malik
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Zayn Malik’s eating disorder came about during his One Direction days. In his 2016 autobiography, Zayn, he shared it would sometimes cause him to go two or three days without eating a single bite of food. “Something I’ve never talked about in public before, but which I have come to terms with since leaving the band, is that I was suffering from an eating disorder. It got quite serious, although at the time I didn’t recognize it for what it was,” he wrote. “When I look back at images of myself—before the final tour—I can see how ill I was. The workload and the pace of life on the road put together with the pressures and strains of everything going on within the band had badly affected my eating habits. Food was something I could control, so I did.”
When she’s not keeping up with the latest health news, Tehrene is probably doing one of the following things: walking her fluffy little dog, Trixie, blogging about food and fitness at TehreneFirman.com, watching Law & Order: SVU, or getting her sweat on in Pilates or spinning. And if she’s not doing any of the aforementioned activities, she’s probably eating french fries.
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