The pressure to have the “perfect” body — as in, one that aligns with the current, idealized, unattainable standard at the moment — is as intense as ever. From preteens to parents, no one is immune to getting self-conscious or insecure about their body, a feeling that can sometimes spiral into an eating disorder with dangerous health consequences. And while these conditions can affect anyone, celebrities have started coming forward over the past few decades to talk about how eating disorders have impacted their lives.
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According to Mayo Clinic, eating disorders are health conditions that affect physical and mental health, and can include issues around eating behaviors and “how you think about food, eating, weight, and shape.” The most common eating disorders are anorexia, which can involve severely limiting calories or cutting out certain kinds of foods; bulimia, which involves eating food in a short period of time, then “purging” afterwards; and binge-eating disorder, which involves eating food (sometimes in large amounts) in a short period of time.
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And while the common stereotype says that only young women suffer from eating disorders, recent research has found that that’s simply not the case. According to a 2014 study cited by the National Eating Disorders Association, 25 percent of people with anorexia are men, and men are at higher risk of dying of the condition — in part because they’re often diagnosed later, as many people assume men don’t have eating disorders. Eating disorders are also prevalent among high school and collegiate athletes.
According to the NEDA, eating disorders arise “from a variety of physical, emotional, and social issues,” and preventing them and lowering their prevalence worldwide means addressing all of those issues. That said, initiating conversations about eating disorders — who they affect, why they occur, and their harmful effects on people — is one step in the right direction. Ahead, these celebrities are doing just that by speaking out about their own experiences to help end the stigma.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, resources is available. Call 1 (888)-375-7767 to reach the help line run by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders or visit the National Eating Disorders Association website for more help and information.
Jane Fonda
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Jane Fonda opened up about her history with bulimia in a 2011 interview with Harper’s Bazaar. During her childhood in the 50s, Fonda said, “I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly… Unless you look perfect, you’re not going to be loved.”
Her battle with bulimia lasted decades. “I wasn’t very happy from, I would say, puberty to 50?” Fonda said. “It took me a long time.” In her 40s, the actress and activist decided to make a change. “If you suffer from bulimia, the older you get, the worse it gets,” she explained. “It takes longer to recover from a bout… I had to make a choice: I live or I die.” One day, she just decided to stop, and realized she had to “fill that empty space with something,” which would end up being her fitness career. “Gloria Steinem said empowerment begins in the muscles,” Fonda said.
Lady Gaga
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Lady Gaga struggled with eating disorders in high school and has opened up about her experience with fans. “I used to throw up all the time in high school,” Gaga said at a Los Angeles high school conference and interview in 2012, per Billboard. “So I’m not that confident. 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. I used to come home and say, ‘Dad, why do you always give us this food? I need to be thin.’ And he’d say, ‘Eat your spaghetti.” In a 2013 post on her website, Gaga noted that she also struggled with anorexia, and both conditions had affected her since age 15, per People.
The singer said she had to stop because the condition “made my voice bad” due to the stomach acid affecting her vocal cords. Even then, “Weight is still a struggle,” she continued. “Every video I’m in, every magazine cover, they stretch you — they make you perfect. It’s not real life. I’m gonna say this about girls: The dieting has got to stop. Everyone just knock it off. Because at the end of the day, it’s affecting kids your age — and it’s making girls sick.”
In a 2014 Harpers Bazaar interview, Gaga said she no longer deals with the eating disorders. “I am better with food,” she said. “I don’t have an eating disorder anymore.”
Shawn Johnson East
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Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson East said her athletic career made her feel pressured to change her body to meet a certain body type. “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,” she told People in 2015. “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.” The gymnast stopped eating carbs, taking it to such an extreme that her body was “shutting down.” She explained, “I was on a diet where I would eat like 700 calories a day – all the way through the 2008 Olympics.”
East was never formally diagnosed with an eating disorder, as she never spoke to a doctor or psychologist about her issues around food, but says the issues stemmed from attaining the “look” she thought judges wanted from gymnasts. Back then, the judges liked the look of a very lean and skinny gymnast that was artistic and graceful, rather than powerful like myself,” East said. She started eating more after the 2008 Olympics, which resulted in a weight gain that led to public judgment when she competed on Dancing With the Stars the following year.
In the years since, she said that her relationship with husband Andrew East and working with a nutritionist have helped her gain confidence. “It might sound cheesy, but my [husband] had a lot to do with it. Before him, I didn’t voice any of this to anybody… There was an open honesty with him. I felt like I could just be me and I knew he was still going to love me.”
Taylor Swift
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In her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, Swift revealed that she struggled with an eating disorder earlier in her career. Seeing a picture of herself “where I feel like … my tummy was too big or… someone said that I looked pregnant… that’ll just trigger me to just starve myself a little bit — just stop eating,” she said in the documentary. “If you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that ass that everybody wants, but if you have enough weight on you to have an ass, your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just f—ing impossible.”
“I thought that I was supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it,” Swift went on. “Now I realize, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel [exhausted].”
In an interview with Variety that year, Swift said that she wasn’t initially sure that she wanted to share her body image issues in the documentary. “But the way that Lana [Wilson, the film’s director] tells the story, it really makes sense. I’m not as articulate as I should be about this topic because there are so many people who could talk about it in a better way. But all I know is my own experience. And my relationship with food was exactly the same psychology that I applied to everything else in my life: If I was given a pat on the head, I registered that as good. If I was given a punishment, I registered that as bad.”
Jessica Alba
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Jessica Alba revealed in a 2019 Goop wellness summit that she felt “preyed upon” by men early in her career, which led her to limit food in an effort to change her “voluptuous” body. “I was meant to feel ashamed if I tempted men,” the actress said, per Page Six. “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.”
Alba didn’t elaborate on the experience, but noted that “nothing about being successful in this business is easy . . . You can’t be bitter.”
Demi Lovato
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Demi Lovato has been open about her issues with food and eating disorders for years, and about the fact that it’s not a problem that can be simply “solved” and put away. Food is “still the biggest challenge in my life,” Lovato said in their 2021 YouTube documentary Simply Complicated. She referenced her six-year relationship with Wilmer Valderrama, noting that she went “three years without purging” during that relationship, but “when we broke up that’s one of the first things I did.”
Lovato said they began binging at age 8, after their little sister was born. “When I feel lonely, my heart feels hungry and I end up bingeing,” she explained. “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.”
Disordered eating is still an issue for the former Disney star. “I don’t want to give it the power that it controls my every thought but it’s something that I’m constantly thinking about,” Lovato said. “Body image, what I wish I could be eating, what I wish I could be eating next, what I wish I didn’t eat, you know, it’s just constant. I get envious towards people who don’t struggle with an eating disorder because I think my life would be so much easier.”
Gabourey Sidibe
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In 2021, Sidibe talked with Taraji P. Henson about developing bulimia in college on Peace of Mind with Taraji. The Empire star explained that she would stop eating for days and would vomit what she would eat. “It was about controlling this emotion that was uncontrollable,” the Precious actress said. I hated this emotion so much, I hated it.” She described bulimia as a “fun little button” that would stop her from experiencing her mental health struggles, which manifested as uncontrollable crying.
“I found a button, and on top of that people were like ‘You’re looking good.’ You know? So why would I stop? It’s like, this was dope, in a way,” Sidibe said. “It was like a self-defense mechanism, that’s what bulimia was for me. It wasn’t about losing weight, it wasn’t about controlling my appetite, it truly was about how it stopped me from crying.”
In her 2017 memoir, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, Sidibe said she was able to address her depression and bulimia after seeking treatment and starting therapy. “I have a nutritionist that I really like,” she told People in 2017. “I haven’t felt like purposely going to throw up. For years, I have not felt that way. But if I ever do, I just have to remember to do the things that make me feel good as opposed to the things that make me feel bad.”
Katie Couric
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Katie Couric shared her struggles with bulimia in her 2021 memoir, Going There, telling People that year that the issue stemmed from her childhood. “There was an aspect of perfectionism and high achieving that was very much a part of our family, and that contributed to my discontent about my body,” said Couric. “There was so much pressure on women, and dieting was so much a part of the culture.”
She aspired to the “extremely thin” body type that seemed to be the ideal at the time and recalled seeing her older sisters “subsist” on cottage cheese. “I remember after college I said, ‘I’ve lost 10 lbs.,’ and my sister said, ‘Keep going!’” She began recovering from bulimia when she realized just how harmful it could be. “I really just started to understand how dangerous it was,” Couric said. “When Karen Carpenter died [of heart failure caused by years of anorexia] in 1983, it shook me to the core.”
Paula Abdul
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Paula Abdul opened up about her 15-year battle with bulimia in a 1995 People interview, describing how she’d “starve myself, then binge, then purge. Whether I was sticking my head in the toilet or exercising for hours a day, I was spitting out the food—and the feelings.”
When the eating disorder began, Abdul was a teenager. “No one thought it was bad,” Abdul said, because so many of her friends were doing the same thing. “Once I tried it, I felt it was an amazing way to control my weight.” The singer attended Overeaters Anonymous meetings after her career took off and with the support of her then-husband, Emilio Estevez, but felt herself slipping again after their divorce in May 1994. “I felt totally not together,” she said. “I was sad, hurt and frustrated, leaving the recording studio in tears. I knew I needed help.” Abdul ultimately checked herself into a psychiatric clinic to treat the condition. In recovery, Abdul said “there are three things I commit to on a daily basis: Exercising for an hour a day, tops. Never skipping meals. And accepting the size and shape I was born with.”
Stacy London
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Stacy London opened up about her past struggles with anorexia and compulsive overeating in her 2012 book, The Truth About Style. “I felt like I’d never had a serious boyfriend and I really wanted to be attractive,” the What Not to Wear star told People at the time, per Parade. London also realized that she wanted to go into fashion “and I was afraid I wouldn’t meet the standard,” she said on The Meredith Vieira Show in 2015. “I said I was gonna lose 10 pounds my senior year of college and I lost 55, 60… that is the thing about eating disorders. It is not solely under your control. The really, really bad ones, they take hold and it is the blackest place you can go.”
After getting a job at Vogue, London recalls gaining twice the amount of weight she’d lost. “It took me about seven years to really normalize and get healthy and eat right and get that out of my system,” she said in 2015.
Hilary Duff
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Hilary Duff is known for her strength and confidence, but in a Women’s Health Australia cover story in 2022, she revealed her past struggles with an eating disorder. “Because of my career path, I can’t help but be like, ‘I am on camera and actresses are skinny,’” the How I Met Your Father star said. “It was horrifying.”
In a 2015 issue of Health, the former Disney star remembered losing a lot of weight at age 17. “I was totally obsessed with everything I put in my mouth. I was way too skinny. Not cute,” she told the outlet, per Page Six. “And my body wasn’t that healthy — my hands would cramp up a lot because I wasn’t getting the nutrition I needed.”
In the Women’s Health Australia article, Duff revealed that she’s now proud of her body and strength. “[I’m] appreciating my health, doing activities that make me feel strong instead of just bettering the outside of my body,” she said. “Spending time with people that make me feel good and share similar views on health and body positivity and getting enough sleep and balance in my diet.”
Elton John
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Elton John has battled multiple addictions throughout his life. “I was cocaine-addicted. I was an alcoholic. I had a sexual addiction. I was bulimic for six years,” the singer 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.”
John recalled making huge meals for himself, then “throw[ing] it all up.” He continued, “I never stood still. I was always rushing, always thinking about the next thing. If I was eating a curry, I couldn’t wait to throw it up so that I could have the next one.”
In interviews about his recovery from addictions, John has said that admitting he needed help was what turned his life around. “I’m OK now,” he told The Mirror. “I’ve resolved every one of the problems I had. I’m happy and optimistic, for the first time ever.”
Lucy Hale
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Lucy Hale first opened up about her struggles around food and body image in at 2012 interview with Cosmopolitan, per HuffPost. “I’ve never really talked about this, but I would go days without eating,” the Pretty Little Liars star said at the time. “Or maybe I’d have some fruit and then go to the gym for three hours. I knew I had a problem.”
In a 2023 appearance on the Diary of a CEO with Steven Barlett podcast, Hale revealed that her struggles began as a teen, when she was homeschooled ad had to log exercise hours for physical education. “That’s the only thing I could think of that started this obsession with movement,” Hale said. “And then I saw my body kind of change and then I started restricting eating, and then it became…it slowly just grew and grew to something that I could not enjoy life. I could not have a conversation. I could not focus on anything.”
“I don’t know how I got out of it,” said Hale, who described having the toxic thoughts on a “constant loop.” She continued, “The thing with eating disorders is it can always creep back up on you. There are days when I don’t feel like my best self, but I love myself enough now to nourish my body.”
Kesha
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Kesha has spoken about her experiences with eating disorders throughout the years, most recently in a 2023 cover story for Self. She told the outlet that the first step in her healing process was checking into rehab in 2014 to treat her bulimia. “ had a particular moment with my eating disorder when the anxiety just got so high that I was not functioning,” she said. “It was taking up so much of my brain space, from morning to night. I was obsessed with what I looked like, what went in my mouth, what size things were and people’s approval.”
Therapy and building new routines has helped Kesha find “freedom from that obsession.” She explained, “It takes work to get there. But sitting here knowing that I don’t count any calories, I don’t know what my pant size is and I don’t weigh myself is so beautiful.”
Troian Bellisario
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Troian Bellisario said anorexia “almost killed me” in a 2017 essay in Lenny Letter, per People. “There is a part of my brain that defies logic. Once, it completely convinced me I should live off 300 calories a day, and at some point, it told me even that was too much,” the Pretty Little Liars star wrote. “That part of my brain is my disease, and there was a time when it had absolute authority over me. It almost killed me, and you can see that even though I have lived in recovery for ten years now, it still finds loads of fun, insidious ways to thwart me to this day.”
Recovery, Bellisario said, was a matter of “hard introspection, intense medical and mental care, a supportive family, friends, and a patient and loving partner.” She wrote, produced, and starred in the movie Feed, about a teenager who is driven to an eating disorder after the death of her twin brother, to “channel that voice into a story and out of myself. I wanted to create a character who also wondered how she could be enough.”
The actress continued, “It is my greatest hope that someone watching it, struggling with the same challenges I do, might think, What if I were enough too? So with all the courage I can muster, I give it to you, I give it to that one person, in hopes that it could make them feel enough.”
Lily Collins
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For over five years, Lily Collins struggled with an eating disorder that involved restricting food intake, binging and burging, and taking laxative and diet pills. She hid her struggle from her family, Collins told Shape in 2017, but finally decided to talk to them and seek help. “My perspective on other people’s view of me was based on this disorder being a secret,” she said at the time. “But the more open I became about it, the more I was able to be myself,” she says.
Collins played a young woman with anorexia in 2017’s To the Bone, telling Variety that the personal connection to the subject matter made the film even more significant to her. “It’s something that a lot of young women go through and there’s no shame in it,” she explained. “This movie is about that — it’s about embracing your past and about 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.”
Collins’ focus later became redefining her body image. “I used to see healthy as this image of what I thought perfect looked like-the perfect muscle definition, etc,” Collins said in the Shape interview. “But healthy now is how strong I feel. It’s a beautiful change, because if you’re strong and confident, it doesn’t matter what muscles are showing. Today I love my shape. My body is the shape it is because it holds my heart.”
Portia de Rossi
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As a young model and then an actress, Portia de Rossi was taught that what I looked like was more important than what I thought, what I did and who I was,” she told Good Morning America in 2010. “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.” Because of that pressure de Rossi felt she “had to diet to be professional, to make sure that I kept working.”
Since the age of 12, de Rossi said, she would “starve myself daily and then binge after the job was over,” returning to the habit every time she needed to lose weight. The Arrested Development star wrote a book about her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in her 2010 book, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain.
Camila Mendes
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In a 2019 Women’s Health interview, Mendes briefly opened up about experiencing and recovering from an eating disorder. “I’ve only recently kind of gotten better,” the Riverdale star told the outlet. “It’s something that’s still a curse to me. It’s not like that ever goes away.”
Mendes says she’s still determined to fight against food anxiety and the pressure to attain a certain appearance and body type. “Whenever I do feel insecure, I go back to health,” she said. “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.” Speaking out about the eating disorder, Mendes adds, is worth it for the people who she knows she can impact. “I’ve met so many people who have reached out to me and in passing who have thanked me for speaking up about it because it made a difference in their lives.”
Zayn Malik
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The former One Direction member first opened up about struggling with disordered eating in his 2016 memoir, Zayn. Per BBC, Malik wrote that “I’d just go for days – sometimes two or three days straight – without eating anything at all. It got quite serious, although at the time I didn’t recognize it for what it was.” The singer explained that the habits stemmed from needing control over something in his life. “I didn’t feel like I had control over anything else in my life, but food was something I could control, so I did,” he wrote.”I had lost so much weight I had become ill. 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.”
In 2017, Malik said that he was able to recover from those habits by addressing the issue of control. “Once I got over the control, the eating just came back into place, super naturally,” he told Sunday Times Style Magazine, per Men’s Health. Returning home to the UK also helped, as he was able to spend time with his mom, eat her homemade meals, and get back in touch with himself.
Zoë Kravitz
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Zoë Kravitz struggled with anorexia and bulimia in high school and into her 20s, telling Complex in 2015 that it felt like “part of being a woman… I don’t think it was about the fame, but I think it was definitely about being around that world, seeing that world. I felt pressured.” As the daughter of Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz, the actress was exposed to the image-centric lifestyle of Hollywood early on. When she later played a girl with anorexia in a film, Kravitz recalls that her parents “got really scared for me to go back down that road.” She continued, “You could see my rib cage. I was just trying to lose more weight for the film but I couldn’t see: You’re there. Stop. It was scary.”
Kravitz suffered from malnourishment after the filming wrapped, but eventually came to a realization on New Years’ Eve 2013. “I just felt it was different,” she said. “I don’t know…if a fucking spirit came over me and said: ‘You have to stop.’”
Jameela Jamil
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Jameela Jamil has been vocal about experiencing an eating disorder as a teen and into adulthood. The Good Place star recalled being weighed in math class — part of a lesson on percentages — and how everyone could see the numbers pop up. Jamil weighed the most. “For the next three weeks all I could hear was people talking about how I was the heaviest girl in the year,” she told Buzzfeed in 2018. “I think I stopped eating around then and it developed into full-formed anorexia and I had like body dysmorphia around 14.”
In a 2022 Instagram post, the actress urged followers “not fear recovery in case it makes your body expand. Think of how it will make your life expand. Your mind expand.” The post featured a photo from 2013, and Jamil remembered how she wouldn’t smile because she thought it made her face look too round, and because “I was too weak, all the time. Grumpy. No sex drive. No ambition. No motivation. My body is just not supposed to be this thin.” She went on to apologize to her younger self “for forcing her into a smaller box, and in turn reducing everything good about her life for the approval of other people… Please don’t be like me. Don’t waste your life. Don’t waste your precious time and your joy. Run towards recovery.”
Nicole Scherzinger
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Nicole Scherzinger struggled with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia before being a part of the Pussycat Dolls, but said that being in the image-focused group made it worse. In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Scherzinger said she would go to the gym for five to eight hours a day and obsessed over food. “A lot of that stole the joy of what I was doing, because I was living in a very dark world,” she said. “I was either working or tormenting myself.”
When Scherzinger hit her early 30s, she began to recover, especially once she realized her bulimia was affecting her vocal cords. “It was a real awakening for me,” the singer said. “We all have a choice. We can choose to beat ourselves up or go back to those old patterns, or we can choose to learn and grow and evolve.”
Lana Condor
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Going to a performing arts high school, Lana Condor spend half of her day practicing dance, she told People in 2021. The emphasis on performance and how she looked took its toll on the young actress. “I was constantly critiquing myself because all you see is yourself in the mirrors, wearing the bare minimum,” she remembered. Despite burning a ton of calories through dance, she would only eat iced coffee, hummus snack packs, and frozen yogurt, the To All the Boys star added. . “I don’t know how I pulled that off. The amount of energy I was putting out versus the amount of food I was eating — that was not healthy.”
Once she began acting, Condor realized what was going on. “In my dancing days, I don’t think I recognized that there was an issue,” she remembered. “I didn’t realize that I have body dysmorphia until I started acting and seeing photos of myself.” Condor leaned on her parents and boyfriend as she began to recover from her habits and the unhealthy mindset she’d cultivated. “The healing is going to be a journey,” Condor said. “Every day it’s talking to yourself like you’re your own best friend.”
Jordan Fisher
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Jordan Fisher was diagnosed with an eating disorder when his wife was pregnant with their son, Riley, who was born in 2022. In an interview with Variety, Fisher said he has a history with anxiety and depression and was dealing with stress at the time due to his wife’s condition, his own health, and his career. “The way that manifested in me was physically not being able to eat,” Fisher explained. “I would go days without food.” He recalled trying “so desperately” to eat, but not being able to. “I love food, which is why I never thought what I was dealing with could be considered an eating disorder,” he said. A person on his team told him he might have an eating disorder, and he began seeing an eating disorder specialist and a therapist.
“I would have meals with her on calls so I could learn to control my appetite and my ability to break past the walls that my body had to build, where I would try to swallow food and immediately regurgitate it. My body would reject it,” Fisher said. He decided to open up about his struggle in order to remind people that everyone is “on their own journeys, and to remind people to be gentle.”
Kate Winslet
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As a young actress, Kate Winslet endured intense body shaming by the press and public, and eventually struggled with an eating disorder as a result. “I never told anyone about it,” she told the New York Times Magazine in a 2024 interview. “Because guess what — people in the world around you go: ‘Hey, you look great! You lost weight!’” Winslet went on to explain how even “complimenting” someone on weight loss can be harmful, and now she shuts down any and all talk on the subject. “[Weight] is one thing I will not let people talk about,” she said. “If they do, I pull them up straight away.”
Ed Sheeran
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It wasn’t until 2023 that Ed Sheeran revealed he struggled with an eating disorder, but now that the singer has opened up about it, in a Rolling Stone interview, he said he’s no longer going to hide it. . “There’s certain things that, as a man talking about them, I feel mad uncomfortable,” the singer said, addressing the stigma around men and eating disorders.
“I have a real eating problem,” he explained to the outlet. It manifested as binge eating, which was fueled by the pressure he felt within the entertainment industry to present a certain body type. “I’m self-conscious anyway, but you get into an industry where you’re getting compared to every other pop star,” he said. “All these people have fantastic figures. And I was always like, ‘Well, why am I so … fat?’ ” Sheeran added that sharing his story felt good. “It’s good to be honest…because so many [men] do the same thing and hide it.”
Melanie Lynskey
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Melanie Lynskey opened up about her long battle with an eating disorder in a 2022 interview with Variety, telling the outlet, “I don’t remember a time before food was the enemy.” She recalled having “eating issues” at age 12, remembering being “obsessed” with having a gap between her thighs. Later, while promoting her first film, Heavenly Creatures, Lynskey remembered feeling like “I was not the things you needed to be [as an actress]… Thin, confident, pretty. Mostly thin.”
In the late 90s, Lynskey’s then-boyfriend “helped me so much with my eating disorder,” she went on. “He tried to stop me from monitoring my own eating and talked to me about how thin I was… I’d never had anybody care that much… The people I had confided in were usually people who also had eating issues, so it would become about swapping tips.” His quasi-intervention “changed my life,” Lynskey said. “I stopped throwing up, mostly. It took a while. But that was a big one. I had, for a very long time, been on this diet that was basically 800 calories a day, and if I ate anything over 800 calories, I would throw up. I was never bingey. Sometimes I’d be starving, and I’d have another teacup of Special K. Then I’d be like, ‘Well, now I gotta throw it up.’”
Now a mom, Lynskey is determined for her daughter’s life to be different. “My number one thing is that I don’t want my daughter to question herself. It’s important to me that she knows who she is and she likes who she is.”
Christina Applegate
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“I just deprived myself of food for years and years and year,” Christina Applegate said of her struggle with anorexia, which she described as “torture” on a May 2024 episode of her podcast, MeSsy, with Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Applegate’s childhood and her early experiences with fame played into her eating disorder, as the actress recalled being called fat at age 10 by a neighborhood boy and then starting Weight Watchers at 15 under her mom’s guidance.
“She was always competitive,” Applegate recalled of her mom, who put her on the program when the actress was starting work on the sitcom Married With Children. “If I got down to 110 [pounds], she’d be like… ‘How’d you do it?’ And the reason was, I had an eating disorder. I would eat five almonds in a day. And if I had six, I would cry and I wouldn’t want to leave the house. And that stuck with me for years and years and years.”
Applegate “wanted my bones to be sticking out” in her character’s outfits and recalled the cast and crew’s concern over her weight loss. “It was very scary to everyone on set because they were like, ‘Christina never eats.’ They talked to me about it.” Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, and the medication she took as well as the side effects of the disease led her to gain 45 pounds. “The demon in my head is coming back really loud and it’s scaring me,” she said honestly, noting that she wanted to set a better example for her teen daughter. “I need to be aware of it so I don’t start falling into bad habits of hurting myself.”
Jamie-Lynn Sigler
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On the same episode of MeSsy, co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler opened up about her own struggles with body image and food began when she was a teenager. “All my friends were talking about food and calories,” she said. “I just started taking note.” After shooting the pilot episode of The Sopranos in 1997, Sigler watched herself on screen and observed that she was “the fullest I had been ever. I didn’t look like any other young woman on any other show that I’d seen,” she said.
In the year between the pilot and the first episode, Sigler said, she developed an eating disorder: exercise bulimia, meaning she would compulsively exercise after eating. She also noted down every morsel of food she ate, “calculating food and calories” in her high school notebooks. When she returned to The Sopranos, Sigler said she was “almost fired” due to how thin she’d become. “They were like, ‘whoa, no, no, no, no, no!’” Sigler recalled. “The show was so supportive and loving and they just wanted me healthy.”
Reneé Rapp
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Reneé Rapp has spoken briefly about her experiences with an eating disorder as well as body dysmorphia, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 that she thought “I had too much of an ass” growing up. The people that helped her reframe her mindset: her mom and Beyoncé. “If I felt badly about my body, my mother would make me sing ‘Bootylicious,’ and it was everything to me,” she said.
Chloe Cherry
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Euphoria star Chloe Cherry got her start as a porn actress, and her eating disorder began during her time in the porn industry, she told the Call Her Daddy podcast in 2022. “This agent that I had when I was porn said to my face that I was fat,” she remembered. “He said, ‘Everyone says that you’re fat and the fastest way to lose weight is by not eating.’” Cherry had never felt that way about her body previously, and the comment came as a shock. “no one in my whole life had ever said that I was fat,” she said. “And then it just became an obsession.”
Cherry went on a vegan diet and limited her calories, an experience she said was “miserable.” Her healing began by finding resources, including working with mental health professionals, listening to podcasts about eating disorder recovery, and talking with her friends. “To get out of it really took a lot of me opening up to all my friends,” Cherry said. “Opening up about it suddenly made it all come down.” In 2020, the actress ended her vegan diet, started eating what she wanted, and hasn’t looked back. “Either I can decide to feel really good about myself or no one else will,” she said.
Tom Daley
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In his 2021 book, Coming Up for Air, Olympic gold medalist diver Tom Daley opened up about developing body issues as a young athlete. “As a diver, you’re up on the diving board and you’re so naked, so visible, so it’s quite hard to be content with your bod,” he told The Guardian in 2021.
“I used to make myself throw up in 2012,” Daley went on. “I weigh myself every day. I’ve had a very strange relationship with food and my body image.” He believes he had a “mild form” of an eating disorder, saying his issues “came from within my sport – it was hammered into me that I was overweight and needed to lose weight in order to perform.”
Daley also addressed the misconception that men don’t develop eating disorders, saying, “it’s hard to talk about it. But I would consider myself to be someone that has very much struggled with body image, and eating, and feeling guilty and shameful of the things that I eat.”
Jordana Brewster
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Fast and Furious star Jordana Brewster opened up about her past struggles with disordered eating in 2021, in an essay she penned for Glamour. She began binge eating in 2007, the first year of her marriage to ex Andrew Form. “While my husband worked a full day on set, I would do the occasional audition. I was bored,” Brewster wrote. “I would raid the mini bar at the Four Seasons for snacks and then promptly go downstairs to make sure it was restocked and paid for before my husband realized anything was missing.” Brewster described feeling stuck, “a buzzing sense of chaos within me that clashed with my actual inertia.”
Later, Brewster “swung to the other extreme” as she started restricting her food. “The cliché that controlling your food gives you the illusion of control of your life is true,” she wrote. “But it also does something else: A fixation with your body gives you tunnel vision. I was so focused on the number on the scale and the number of calories I consumed in a day that I ignored all other problems.” The actress credits “years of therapy” that helped her through her issues with control and eating. “Now I’m lucky to be at a level of peace with my body. If body issues do come up, I deal with them head-on.”
Laurie Hernandez
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In the leadup to the 2016 Olympics, gymnast Laurie Hernandez remembered being “really obsessive” about food, she told Insider in 2021, which manifested as binge-eating and purging. “With gymnastics being a sport where everything must be perfect — your hair, routines, body, face, all of it — it was just a lot,” Hernandez said.
Since then, she’s focused on listening to her body and its needs in order to heal her relationship to food. “If I want more carbs, then my body is clearly asking for more carbs. If I want more protein, my body is asking for more protein,” Hernandez said. “ I want to be strong and be able to rely on my body.”
Charli D’Amelio
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In a 2020 Instagram story, TikTok star Charli D’Amelio opened up about her “struggles with eating disorders,” something D’Amelio said she’d “been afraid to share” previously. “i’ve always tried to use my voice when it comes to issues surrounding body image, but I’ve never talked about my own struggles with eating disorders,” she wrote, per People. “it’s so uncomfortable to admit to even your closest friend and family, let alone the world. i’ve been afraid to share that I have an eating disorder, but ultimately i hope that by sharing this i can help someone else.”
Eating disorders are “something that so many other people are also battling behind closed doors,” she wrote. “for anyone that is struggling with this, i know some days can be worse than others… i need you to know you are not alone. remember it’s ok to reach out and get help.”
Mel C
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While the Spice Girls’ meteoric rise to fame was exhilarating, Mel C (aka Sporty Spice) remembers the time as a “mixed bag of emotions,” she told The Daily Mail in 2022. Mel C was dealing with depression and an eating disorder at the time, the latter spurred by a comment made by the group’s former manager in 1994 about the singer’s thighs. She internalized the shame and started eliminating food groups, including carbs, and would binge eat in an effort to lose weight.
“So many of my issues were driven by control or lack of control,” she explained. “I was binge drinking. I was binge eating. I was embarrassed and ashamed of it.” When the Spice Girls disbanded, Mel C realized “it was definitely time to get outside help.” She was diagnosed with depression, anorexia, and a binge-eating disorder, among other conditions, and began taking antidepressants. Nowadays, she says, she’s impressed by her strength. “Sometimes when I think of what I have done and what I now deal with every day; with work, with being a mum, with family stuff. And I’m like, fuck, I’m still standing.”
Jade Thirlwall
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Jade Thirlwall used to think of anorexia as her “dark secret,” she said on a BBC podcast in 2019. The Little Mix star dealt with anorexia as a teenager, becoming “very gaunt” and wearing baggy clothes to hide it. She sought treatment in the hospital at age 16, where a doctor told her she would die if she continued this way. “To hear somebody say that to you is actually quite scary and I started to realize how damaging it was for my family,” Thirlwall recalled. “I’d become so selfish with how I felt about myself I forgot that I had family and friends who were also really hurting because of what I was doing.”
Thirlwall shared that the idea of losing her career as a singer was enough to keep her from relapsing, though the fame that comes with that career hasn’t always been helpful. “Honestly, I still have times where I’ll feel a bit sad or down about something, but I now don’t associate that with eating any more,” she explained. “I don’t punish myself in that way.”
Zosia Mamet
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In a 2014 essay for Glamour, Zosia Mamet opened up about her struggle with anorexia, one that was “mostly private, a war raging inside me,” The Flight Attendant star wrote. Mamet remembered being told she was fat “for the first time” at age eight, a comment that created a “monster in my brain” parroting the message for years, convincing her “my clothes don’t fit or that I’ve eaten too much.” Mamet continued, “At times it has forced me to starve myself, to run extra miles, to abuse my body. As a teenager I used to stand in front of the refrigerator… for hours, opening and closing the door, taking out a piece of food then putting it back in; taking it out, putting it in my mouth, and then spitting it into the garbage.”
Mamet’s father eventually put her in treatment, but the Girls actor didn’t address the root cause of her disorder — “control of [my] life and of [my] body” — and relapsed. Now at a healthy weight, Mamet said, “I realize that my obsession will always be with me in some way… It may never disappear completely, but hopefully one day it’ll be so quiet, it’ll only be a whisper.”
Tallulah Willis
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Tallulah Willis wrote about her four-year struggle with anorexia in a personal essay for Vogue in 2023, describing it as a kind of vice, the last one she “got to hold on to” after getting sober at age 20 and seeking treatment for depression and ADHD at age 25. When her ADHD medication suppressed her appetite, Willis wrote, “I saw a way to banish the awkward adolescent in favor of a flighty little pixie.”
As she struggled with body dysmorphia and the simultaneous decline of her father, Bruce Willis (who was later diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia), Willis recalled the physical effects of her eating disorder. “I was always freezing,” she said. “… I couldn’t walk in my Los Angeles neighborhood because I was afraid of not having a place to sit down and catch my breath.” In June 2023, Willis’ family “stepped in as they had done before,” she said, and sent her to a recovery center, where she began new kinds of therapy and tweaked her medications. “Recovery is probably lifelong,” she wrote, “but I now have the tools to be present in all facets of my life, and especially in my relationship with my dad.”
Sara Evans
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Country star Sara Evans revealed that she struggles with an eating disorder on a 2024 episode of Cheryl Burke’s Sex, Lives, and Spray Tans podcast. “I have an eating disorder,” she said candidly. “I’m more scared of being fat than anything in the world, and that’s not good. That’s not normal.” A mom of three, Evans also deals with body dysmorphia and said that, “every time I had a baby,” her record label reps would ask “When’s she gonna lose weight?” the singer recalled. “Things like that would just get in my head.”
Her mental health and people-pleasing tendencies also play into it. “I’m a people pleaser,” Evans explained. “Like, if I’m skinny and I’m pretty and I did a good show, then I’m loved…and I want to feel loved no matter what.”
Dara Torres
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Dara Torres is a decorated American swimmer with 12 Olympic medals to her name, but her collegiate training environment led her to struggle with bulimia for five years. “My coach was pretty adamant about how he wanted us to look on the starting blocks and would weigh us every week,” she said in an interview with People in 2024. “And if we didn’t make weight, you had to do extra workouts, which was the last thing anyone wanted to do.” As a self-described people pleaser, Torres says she also put pressure on herself to be a certain weight in order to make her coach happy.
Torres eventually sought help from a psychiatrist and said she’s recovered now, but that she harbored a fear of certain foods for a years afterward. “Certain foods were triggers for me,” she explained. “It becomes an addiction, and it’s really hard to break out of that cycle.”
Jackie Goldschneider
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Jackie Goldschneider’s struggle with anorexia began when she was 17, when a doctor told the future Real Housewives of New Jersey star that “I wouldn’t have any fun in college if I was fat,” she recalled on the Whine Down podcast in January 2024. She decided to share her struggle publically in 2018 on an episode of RHONJ and later released a memoir called The Weight of Beautiful.
Now, Goldschneider says she’s “about 75 percent recovered” from the disorder, still dealing with “these old habits that I’m scared to let go of.” But, she emphasizes, “I am not anorexic anymore. I don’t restrict like that anymore.” The 47-year-old no longer weighs herself, a habit that “was very obsessive for me” in the depths of the disorder, though she says she’s been talking to her dietician and therapist about stepping on the scale again. “They both think it’s a horrible idea,” she says. “I think that if I was truly recovered and in a really healthy place, I wouldn’t need to know a number.”
Snooki
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Snooki (aka Nicole Polizzi) has been known for her confidence since her first days on Jersey Shore, but she hasn’t always been so self-assured. In 2024, the reality star told E! News that she dealt with anorexia in high school, explaining that as a cheerleader, she felt the pressure to fit a certain body type. “But then I just felt so confident in myself,” she said. “I was like, ‘You know what? Whatever, I don’t care what size I am. As long as I’m happy and I’m enjoying life, I don’t really care.’”
Being in the spotlight didn’t change that mindset either. While on Jersey Shore, “I never cared what anyone thought about me,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m happy, I’m good, I’m confident. I feel confident in my skin no matter what size.” Now, the mom of three is more focused on being strong. “I want to be able to run around [with] my kids, not be out of breath. Or like…walk up the stairs and not be dying. So, my goal right now is to just be strong and have muscles.”
Molly Sims
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Model Molly Sims opened up to HuffPost in 2015 about the extreme lengths she went to in trying to lose weight, including walking 14 miles a day and asking a plastic surgeon if they could “make my calves smaller” when she was just 23 years old. “I didn’t eat sometimes for a couple of days,” she added. She said her self-image had changed, especially once she started her family. “Other things have become more important… I’m not consumed with trying to get into the size two.”
Bridget Malcolm
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In a 2018 blog post, former Victoria’s Secret model Bridget Malcolm detailed her experience with an unlicensed “celebrity nutritionist,” who put her on a “starvation diet plan” that resulted in Malcolm losing her period and developing “debilitating” stomach problems. Malcolm cycled on and off the “diet plans,” justifying it to herself as necessary for her career: “I would just stay on the shakes and vegetables until I retired from modeling,” she wrote. She finally decided to stop when she realized she might not survive losing that much weight again. “Why am I holding onto this expensive, fear based diet that isn’t serving me anymore?” Malcolm wondered. Now, she advocates for change in the fashion industry, saying, “I want women to be able to be the size that works for them. We should not be… told to diminish.”
Emmy Russell
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American Idol season 22 contestant Emmy Russell auditioned for the show with an original song, “Skinny,” inspired by her harrowing experience with an eating disorder. In a 2024 interview with People, Russell explained that her eating disorder began in high school but spun out of control on a mission trip to Brazil at age 22. “All of a sudden I started getting a little bit sick and I was like, ‘Why am I not keeping any of my food down?’” recalled Russell, the granddaughter of late country music star Loretta Lynn. “Then I started seeing results from me getting sick, and then it just spun out of control.” Russell remembered feeling “shame” at the return of her eating disorder and returned home to Nashville, where her mom helped her seek treatment.
It was during that period of recovery that Russell wrote “Skinny,” and says that the song continues to give her strength. “When I wrote ‘Skinny,’ I felt a weight of responsibility [and thought], ‘I don’t need to go back to this. I know it’s bad for me,’” she explained. The more she sings the song, the more she reminds herself that she’s “above” and past that feeling. “Beauty from ashes, that’s music for me. It’s like the ashes are the pain and I make something out of it.”
