Celebrities Who Opened Up About Overcoming Eating Disorders — and What They Said About Recovery
Celebrities Who Opened Up About Overcoming Eating Disorders — and What They Said About Recovery
Diana Pearl, Stephanie SengweSat, February 28, 2026 at 1:00 PM UTC
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Ed Sheeran, Demi Lovato, Kerry WashingtonCredit: Vivien Killilea/Getty; Rich Fury/Getty; Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty
With National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (NEDAW) coming to a close March 1, celebrities who have experienced the condition spoke out about their experience to draw attention to just how widespread they are — and how harmful misconceptions about them can be.
The National Institute of Mental Health states: “Eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses that are associated with severe disturbances in people’s eating behaviors and related thoughts and emotions.”
Symptoms can include a disordered intake of food — be it binge-eating, purposefully not eating enough or purging food after its been eaten — and concerns about body weight. And in an industry as looks-focused as Hollywood, it may not be surprising that eating disorders have affected many stars at one time or another.
The celebrities below — from Kerry Washington to Elton John to Demi Lovato to Victoria Beckham and more — have all been open about their eating disorders. Read on to learn how they have overcome them and have worked on self-acceptance and body-positivity.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, The Alliance for Eating Disorders provides a fully-staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235, as well as free, therapist-led support groups.
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Kerry Washington
Kerry WashingtonCredit: Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty
Kerry Washington is famously guarded about her personal life, but in her 2023 memoir, Thicker Than Water, she shared revelations that included having had an eating disorder during her college years.
"By the time I got to college, my relationship with food and my body had become a toxic cycle of self-abuse that utilized the tools of starvation, binge eating, body obsession, and compulsive exercise. I would, when seeking to stuff my feelings, stuff my face, secretly binge eating for days at a time, often to the point of physical pain, sometimes to the point of passing out," she wrote.
However, she didn't resort to throwing up, she wrote. Instead, "my drive toward perfectionism directed me toward control, either by not eating for days at a time, or by exercising for several hours, all in an attempt to right the wrongs of the bingeing."
Washington has since entered recovery and has been a dedicated mental health advocate her entire career.
"When we think about mental health and behavioral changes there, I've always thought it's so complicated, because my substance is not something that I can put down,” Washington said during a luncheon with Equip Health, in reference to her relationship to food. “I have to take this tiger out of the cage and pet it three times a day.”
"That idea of perfectionism is impossible in this recovery, because you can't perfect something that's ever-evolving,” she explained. “I have to just be willing to continue to be curious and loving and show up.”
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Demi Lovato
Demi LovatoCredit: Vivien Killilea/Getty
Lovato famously battled an eating disorder in the spotlight, entering a treatment facility in 2011 for anorexia and bulimia at 18 years old. "I'd be lying if I said there weren't days where I just want to stay in bed all day because I'm ashamed of my body," she told PEOPLE shortly after leaving the facility. "It's a struggle I'll probably have to deal with for the rest of my life. But I have so much life to live; I don't want to waste it."
During an interview with American Way, the singer candidly discussed growing up with a mother who suffered from an eating disorder and how an early introduction to the beauty pageant scene affected her self-image.
"Even though I was 2 or 3 years old, being around somebody who was 80 lbs. and had an active eating disorder … it's hard not to grow up like that," she told the magazine. "I'm nowhere near having children, but already I ask myself questions. My grandma had bulimia, my mom had it, I had it, and hopefully my kids won't have it, but it's kind of like addiction. It's hereditary."
As for beginning her pageant career at the age of 7, Lovato said, "My body-image awareness started way before that, but I do attribute a little of my insecurities to being onstage and judged for my beauty."
Almost a decade later, Lovato is on the other side and even released a cookbook that's meant to serve as inspiration for others. "if u had told the demi 10 years ago who was struggling with disordered eating that she would one day be releasing a cookbook, she would never believe u," the actress wrote on Instagram in Feb. 2026, in recognition of NEDAW.
"i created this book from a place of knowing how intimidating the kitchen can be and after learning how important it is to nourish yourself. it all started with taking tiny steps every day to heal my relationship with food, truly one plate at a time 🤍"
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Lily Collins
Lily CollinsCredit: Jed Cullen/Dave Benett/Getty
Lily Collins opened up about her past struggles with anorexia and bulimia in a collection of essays titled Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me. In it, the star revealed her eating disorder began when her father, Phil Collins, split from her stepmother when she was a teen.
"I couldn’t handle the pain and confusion surrounding my dad’s divorce, and I was having a hard time balancing being a teenager with pursuing two different grown-up careers — both of which I’d chosen myself, but which also focused heavily on how I looked,” she wrote about her modeling and acting careers.
“Eating was no longer a fun social event, but instead a chore and a punishment. I was exhausted and antsy and bitchy all the time. I sure as hell wasn’t much fun. But my plan was working! I was in control! I was skinny!”
Fast forward decades later, Lily has added her voice to stars creating awareness.
"I want to take a moment to acknowledge Eating Disorder Awareness Week,” the Emily in Paris star wrote in a Feb. 26 post to her Instagram stories about the awareness-raising campaign, sponsored by the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), which she said was doing "lifesaving work."
"As someone who has struggled with an eating disorder — and was able to tell the story of so many others like me through my character in To the Bone — I've always advocated for more awareness and understanding surrounding disorders so no one has to struggle in silence or shame," she wrote in part.
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Eiza Gonzalez
Credit: Mike Marsland/WireImage
Actress Eiza Gonzalez is another star who partnered with NEDA in Feb. 2026 to raise awareness about eating disorders for the awareness week, posting a photo of herself looking strong in the gym to reflect on how far she's come.
After saying that she developed an eating disorder after becoming famous at a young age and trying to restrict her eating to deflect any scrutiny about her body, she came to the realization that she'd never earn everyone's approval, and she had to find confidence internally instead.
"The one thing I learned from all this is how powerful the mind can be and how much we can change when we set our will to it. The same energy you put into shrinking yourself, or conforming into the standard can be used to build what you really dream to be," she said. "I’ve become deeply committed to giving my body love—fueling it with kindness, care, and respect so it can feel happy and fulfilled. I’m proud of where I am and of the hard work it’s taken to break old patterns. ...I don’t like to pretend the journey is over, it’s hard, complex. But NEVER too late."
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Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Christina applegate
Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Christina applegateCredit: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty; Emma McIntyre/Getty
Long-term friends Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler opened up about their struggles on an episode of their podcast MesSy in May 2024.
Applegate went first, saying that her issues stemmed from her mom, who put her in WeightWatchers when she was a teen. "She was always competitive," recalled Applegate. "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."
Sigler then revealed that her relationship with food turned when she was also a teenager, recalling that "all my friends were talking about food and calories," so she "just started taking note."
Her struggle was amplified after she shot the pilot episode of The Sopranos in 1997 and saw herself on the screen. "I 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. "There was a year between the pilot and the first episode and during that time, I had the eating disorder."
Sigler says she was suffering from exercise bulimia, where she would compulsively exercise after eating. And she would keep an eagle eye on everything she consumed. "Every notebook, if you had a notebook from my sophomore and junior year of high school has like little numbers on the corner of it, just calculating food and calories," she said.
Though they admitted that the gnawing voices in their heads never fully go away — Applegate recalled a joke she made at the Emmys because she felt insecure about the weight gain brought on by her multiple sclerosis medication — both actresses agreed that being candid about their struggles, "is a good thing, because nobody was talking about it with me," said Sigler, who added that for her, "the eating stuff was control, but as soon as I started to just kind of be more confident in who I was... I was able to let a lot of that go."
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Jessie Diggins
Credit: Matthias Hangst/Getty
Olympic athletes tend to thrive under demanding circumstances which require perfectionism, and that makes them particularly susceptible to eating disorders, as many have recounted. One who has spoken about it is Olympic skiier (and recent bronze medalist) Jessie Diggins, who had an eating disorder treatment in high school, then relapsed a few years ago, following the Beijing Olympics.
“I was putting so much pressure on myself to be perfect in everything that I did, and so I really started to need some sort of coping mechanism,” she told Time of how her condition began. “My eating disorder essentially became a way to numb that voice in my head that was saying, ‘You're not enough, you're not doing enough, you will never be good enough.’ I would never speak to another human being the way I spoke to myself back then, which is terribly sad.”
These days, she supports The Emily Program (where she was treated in high school) and is open about her condition to help others.
“I wear my past on my head at all times as not only acknowledgement that it's OK if you're not perfect, it’s OK if you need to ask for help, but also to keep using this as an icebreaker over and over for other people,” she said.
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Victoria Beckham
Victoria BeckhamCredit: Neil Mockford/Getty
Victoria Beckham made rare comments about her past eating disorder in her eponymous Netflix documentary, which came out last fall.
The fashion designer revealed that constant media scrutiny warped her sense of self and led her down the wrong path.
"I was weighed on national television when [her first child] Brooklyn was 6 months old," she explained, reflecting on the media scrutiny she received postpartum.
"'Get on those scales’... 'Have you lost the weight?' We laugh about it and we joke about it when we're on television, but I was really, really young and that hurts," she recalled.
"I really started to doubt myself and not like myself because I let it affect me. I didn't know what I saw when I looked in the mirror. You lose all sense of reality. I’ve been everything from ‘Porky Posh’ to ‘Skinny Posh'."
She's adapted a healthier, more disciplined way of eating since. "In the way that I eat, I'm very very disciplined," she said, noting that she doesn't "deny" herself of anything. "I expect a lot from myself being a working mum [with] four children. I work out a lot, I eat very healthily. That's just who I am."
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Sophie Turner
Sophie TurnerCredit: Dave Benett/Getty
Sophie Turner's bulimia was so serious, she had a live-in therapist with her at one point. "For a long time, I was quite sick with an eating disorder and I had a companion … a live-in therapist, who would ensure I wasn't doing anything unhealthy with my eating habits," she told Elle UK in 2022.
Like Beckham, the constant comments about her body when she was first cast in Game of Thrones at age 16 left her feeling insecure.
Though she's now in a better space, the actress noted that people will always have something to say.
"When you’re bulimic, your face tends to bloat. So when I finally did get better in my early 20s, my face went back to normal. Then, suddenly, all the comments were about whether I’d had buccal fat removal or not,” she told British Vogue in 2024. “So yeah, you can never win.”
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Tallulah Willis
Credit: Neilson Barnard/Getty
At just 13 years old, Willis said a "switch flipped," and she started to hate herself. "I thought, I am a hideous, disgusting-looking person," she told Teen Vogue. "I might be nice and I might be kind, but I'm a really unattractive human being."
That mindset continued throughout her teens, until eventually her older sister Scout stepped in, and she started treatment. In January 2015, Willis said she was on the road to recovery. "I can say that I'm getting to that place where I'm starting to feel okay with myself, bit by bit."
In 2026, Willis reflected on how far she had come since her days with the disorder to commemorate NEDAW. "I had to lean so far into the unknown for me, but I knew it was where I needed to be at that moment to finally come back from the brink. I'm grateful for my second chance at life, and the freedom recovery has given me."
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Tess Holliday
Tess Holliday
In May 2021, Holliday shared her own journey on social media after receiving comments about her weight.
"I'm anorexic and in recovery. I'm not ashamed to say it out loud anymore," Holliday posted on Twitter. "I'm the result of a culture that celebrates thinness and equates that to worth, but I get to write my own narrative now. I'm finally able to care for a body that I've punished my entire life and I am finally free."
"To everyone that keeps saying 'you're looking healthy lately' or 'You are losing weight, keep it up!' Stop," she wrote on Instagram. "Don't. Comment. On. My. Weight. Or. Perceived. Health. Keep. It. To. Yourself. Thanks✌🏻"
She added, "I'm healing from an eating disorder and feeding my body regularly for the first time in my entire life."
Holliday ended her post by telling people that "if you can't tell someone they look nice without making it about their size, then baby, please don't say nuthin at all."
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Elton John and Billie Jean King
Sir Elton John and Billie Jean KingCredit: KMazur/WireImage for Rogers & Cowan
Long-term friends Elton John and Billie Jean King bonded over many things when they first met. The first was that they were both gay at a time when people weren't exactly kind; the second was that they both had eating disorders.
In the documentary Give Me the Ball!, which chronicles the life and legacy of King, the tennis legend revealed, "We confided in each other about how it was for each other and how hard it was to be gay,” King said. “We talked a lot about that and how it was horrible hiding — what do you do, how do you figure it out?”
"Those sorts of things take their toll, and we had very honest conversations about food, as an addictive substance,” John added. “You have to eat to stay alive. I did other drugs, but the hardest drug to give up is food. We both suffered from that.”
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Ed Sheeran
Ed SheeranCredit: Rich Fury/Getty
In a 2023 cover story for Rolling Stone, Sheeran revealed he often compared himself to other male singers earlier in his career, leading him to think he was "so fat."
"I'm self-conscious anyway, but you get into an industry where you're getting compared to every other pop star," he told the outlet.
"I was in the One Direction wave, and I'm like, 'Well, why don't I have a six pack?' And I was like, 'Oh, because you love kebabs and drink beer.' Then you do songs with Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes. All these people have fantastic figures. And I was always like, 'Well, why am I so … fat?'"
"So I found myself doing what Elton talks about in his book — gorging, and then it would come up again," the singer revealed, referencing lton John's memoir in which he revealed he suffered from bulimia for six years.
Since then, Sheeran revealed he has steered those urges into a healthier track. "I'm a real binge eater. I'm a binge-everything. But I'm now more of a binge exerciser."
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Advertisement
JoJo
JoJoCredit: Matt Baron/Shutterstock
The "Leave (Get Out)" singer revealed in an interview with Uproxx that she was put on a 500-calorie diet as a teenager.
"I was like, 'Let me see how skinny I can get, because maybe then they'll put out an album. Maybe I'm just so disgusting that no one wants to see me in a video and they can't even look at me,'" JoJo recalled thinking after being told to lose weight by her previous label, Blackground. "That's really what I thought."
She was finally released from her contract with Blackground Records in 2014, and told Uproxx of her recovery since, “This journey has been a journey of learning how to love myself. I feel really lucky, really, really grateful for the longevity that I have and for the resilience that I do have. But I work on it every day. I want to create a life for myself and I want to create a legacy.”
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Jameela Jamil
Jameela JamilCredit: Frazer Harrison/Getty
The Good Place actress developed anorexia and body dysmorphia at age 14 after a class project required her to be weighed in front of her entire class.
In 2019, Jamil told PEOPLE of her disorder, "I was really unhappy and I think it contributed to my ability to have an eating disorder for so long, because there was no one kind of monitoring me and I had no one to turn to with my sadness and bad feelings, so I just had a really rough time as a teenager."
The actress reflected on her disorder in December 2019, when she posted a photo of herself at the height of her disorder.
"Eating disorders/dysmorphia are so wild," she said. "I missed my teens/20s."
Jamil added that she was able to recover from her disorders with EMDR therapy, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, where people think back to a traumatic event and then use their eyes to track a therapist's hand movements, which helps patients reprocess their trauma.
"The therapy I used to help me was called EMDR, it works faster so it was much cheaper," she said. "CBT [Cognitive Behavioral Therapy] didn't work for me personally. So if it doesn't work for you, try EMDR. It's free in some countries."
Now, the actress is outspoken about diet culture and the celebrities who endorse it and even created I WEIGH, a community that encourages inclusivity and body positivity. She is one of the celebrities who has spoken out against the use of Ozempic for weight loss reasons.
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Taylor Swift
Taylor SwiftCredit: Dave J Hogan/Getty
Swift said in her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, that she struggled with an eating disorder throughout her very successful career.
"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," Swift said. This mentality, paired with public scrutiny, led her to restrict food.
Swift didn't realize at the time that she was not meant to feel fatigued after performing: "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. Now I realize, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows."
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Alyson Stoner
Alyson StonerCredit: Shannon Beveridge
The former child star opened up to PEOPLE in 2019 about the dark side of her fame — which included anxiety and eating disorders.
At one point, Stoner says she got so thin that casting directors wouldn't even let her read lines when she went on auditions.
"They would just tell me that I need help and [need] to go home and take care of my health because my eyes were sunken in and I was tired and lifeless," she says. "The scary part is I wasn't even the smallest person on set."
In 2011, Stoner was hospitalized and admitted herself to rehab for further treatment of her eating disorders. At the time, she was 17 years old and a few months away from her 18th birthday.
"I chose to keep the process private in order to put legitimate healing first," she said. "Before treatment, the dietician estimated my caloric intake to be less than 700 calories with an average of two to eight hours of intense exercise a day. I have entire journals breaking down the grams of polyunsaturated fat and added sugar in every bite I ate."
She added: "I still have my hospital gown, binder and letters from other patients tucked in a drawer as a reminder of one of the best choices I've made for my health."
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Camila Mendes
Camila Mendes
The Riverdale star talked to SHAPE in 2018 about struggling with bulimia when she was in high school, college and starting out in Hollywood. "I was so scared of carbs that I wouldn't let myself eat bread or rice ever. I'd go a week without eating them, then I would binge on them, and that would make me want to purge," Mendes says. "If I ate a sweet, I would be like, 'Oh my God, I'm not going to eat for five hours now.' I was always punishing myself. I was even anxious about healthy food: Did I eat too much of the avocado? Did I have too many fats for one day? I was consumed with the details of what I was eating, and I always felt as if I was doing something wrong."
Mendes worked with a therapist and a nutritionist to address her disordered eating, and is now open about her experiences with her social media following. "I realized that I have this platform, and young women and men who look up to me, and there is a tremendous power to do something positive with it," she said. "It was definitely a very vulnerable thing to put that out there to almost 12 million people on social media. But that's who I am."
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Ireland Baldwin
Ireland BaldwinCredit: ISO/SilverHub/REX/Shutterstock
The daughter of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger opened up about her past struggles with anorexia on Instagram in 2018 when she shared an old photo of herself along with the caption, "Anorexia throwback." Ireland also posted a photo of her younger self posing in a bikini, writing, "Nope."
"I battled with many eating disorders and body issues as a younger girl and it took me a long time to find self love and acceptance! Trust me, all of that pain and destruction I inflicted on myself wasn't worth it. Turning down so. Many. Sides. Of. Fries. Wasn't worth it!!" the model wrote.
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Sadie Robertson
Sadie RobertsonCredit: Michael Stewart/FilmMagic
In 2017, the Duck Dynasty star got personal about a secret eating disorder she battled for nearly a year in a candid post on her blog, speaking out for the first time about the private pain she experienced.
"I struggled with an eating problem connected to a negative body image," Robertson said, adding that she kept the disorder from everyone in her life including her mother. "It was dark. It was ugly. It was insanely difficult. It was done in secret. It was hidden. … My self-worth was demolished, and I began to lose sight of my true identity." At the time she posted on her blog, Robertson said she's 15 pounds heavier than she was after competing on Dancing with the Stars in 2014. "I am feeling good," she said. "If it means being 'less beautiful' in the world's eyes, that's okay with me. As long as I still get to seek out real beauty — the kind that is found in God's word, and is painted out in the world before me."
"Do these old thoughts come back from time to time? Absolutely, but it is my job to take authority over them," she continued.
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Troian Bellisario
Troian BellisarioCredit: David Livingston/Getty Images
The Pretty Little Liars star has long been open about her battle with anorexia as a teenager, first in an interview with Seventeen in 2013, and then in a PSA in November 2016. "With anorexia, a lot of it is presenting a front of 'everything is okay' as you're slowly killing yourself," she says in the voting PSA for ATTN. "Gone were the days when I was just a happy, carefree kid who was running around, and suddenly I felt this inability to interact with people and to nourish myself."
Bellisario decided to face those dark days head on by writing and starring in her film, Feed (2017), which tackles the issue of eating disorders. "It was not easy; it was like engaging with an addiction," Bellisario told Interview Magazine of working on the film based on her personal experiences.
"One of the things I really wanted the film to explore was that once you have this relationship, once you have this mental illness or this disease, it never really goes away. It was amazing for me to realize, 'Oh God, this is still all just lying under the surface. I've just gotten really good at either ignoring it or choosing to not engage with it,'" she revealed. "But it's amazing that you can have this huge, life-threatening thing be a part of you and still live inside of you, and almost tame it in a weird way."
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Gabourey Sidibe
Credit: Ilya S. Savenok/Getty
In addition to revealing that she underwent weight-loss surgery, the Empire star opened up about her bouts with depression and bulimia in her book This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare. "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 wrote in her 2017 memoir, explaining that her bulimia was a way to cope with her depression, not to lose weight. "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."
The actress is doing much better now, she revealed. As for dealing with the eating disorder, "I have to eat every day. I have to eat several times a day, forever," added Sidibe. "I have a nutritionist that I really like. 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."
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Zayn Malik
Zayn MalikCredit: Kevin Tachman/Getty
The former boy bander spoke out about his struggle with an eating disorder in his 2016 book, Zayn. Malik said the intensity of his jam-packed schedule at the height of One Direction's popularity led him to skip multiple meals in a row, sometimes for multiple days.
"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," he wrote. "It wasn't as though I had any concerns about my weight or anything like 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."
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Ginger Zee
Ginger ZeeCredit: Richie Buxo/Splash news
Zee struggled to find contentment with her body in her adolescence. On the semi-final night of her season of Dancing with the Stars, she opened up about her battle with anorexia, which she says was at its worst from ages 10 to 14.
"It's a moment in my life that I've not shared with a lot of people," she told PEOPLE in 2020. "It's not something I'm proud of because it's a disease that I chose." She credits her mother and stepfather for helping her through. "My stepfather is a saint. He came into our lives and he taught me about nutrition and self love and once I started to learn about taking calories in and working calories off, then I got obsessed with working out," she said. "Everybody goes through those stages. He helped me to get out of that moment in my life."
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Alexa PenaVega
Alexa PenavegaCredit: Gustavo Caballero/Getty
Zee wasn't the only DWTS contestant to open up about an eating disorder on the show. After experiencing a childhood in the spotlight, PenaVega developed bulimia in response to a movie producer telling her she was too fat. For six years, she struggled to overcome the disease. "You read textbooks and it's just so, well, textbook. 'This is how you get over bulimia.' But it is so much deeper than that," she said in 2015. "I wish I'd had somebody who could have told me, 'It's scary.' You struggle giving it up. You want to get rid of it but you struggle because, in a strange way, you enjoy it."
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Kesha
KeshaCredit: Jamie McCarthy/Getty
Well before her legal troubles with her label and allegations of sexual assault against Dr. Luke, Kesha was struggling with another issue — her eating disorder. The star completed a rehab program for her disorder in 2014 and opened up to Vogue about her darkest times a year later.
"There was a lot of not eating — and I started to think being hungry to the point of feeling almost faint was a positive thing," she said. "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.'"
Kesha ended up going to a rehab facility specifically for people experiencing eating disorders. "I realized being healthy is the most important thing I can do for myself. Now, I'm trying to embrace the skin I'm in. It's difficult sometimes," she told Vogue. "Every day I have to look in the mirror and make the choice to be kind to myself. This is who I am — I have to love that."
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Zoë Kravitz
Zoë Kravitz
Kravitz experienced some bumps on the road to success — and a big one came in the form of her battle with anorexia and bulimia, which started as a teenager and followed her into adulthood. It was her star-studded upbringing, she says, that made her have a difficult time loving herself. "I think it was part of being a woman, and being surrounded by [fame]," she told Complex magazine in 2015. "I think it was definitely about being around that world, seeing that world. I felt pressured."
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Beverly Johnson
Beverly JohnsonCredit: Alberto E. Rodriguez/WireImage
Decades after she became the first Black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue, iconic supermodel Beverly Johnson opened up about the dangerous diets she employed to stay on top in the modeling world. "I was eating nothing, zero," she said in her 2015 book, The Face That Changed It All. "I drank black coffee, a sip of broth if things got tough, and in the evening, a glass of champagne as a pick me up. We didn't even drink water. We thought it was fattening." This sort of toxic behavior was wrongly encouraged: "The skinner you were, the more fabulous you were."
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Candace Cameron Bure
Candace Cameron BureCredit: Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage
Though she shot to childhood stardom on Full House, Bure says that it wasn't until the show wrapped that she developed an eating disorder. She moved to Montreal — a city where she didn't know many people — for her husband's hockey career, and not working for the first time since she was 5 years old, Bure felt isolated and lost.
"My husband would play away 41 games out of 82 during hockey season," she said. "I sat lonely so many nights not knowing what to do with myself. But there was always one friend that was always there, that was so readily available anytime I wanted, and that for me was food."
She fell into a cycle of binging and purging that continued on-and-off for years. "It was never about the weight for me," she told PEOPLE in May 2016. "It was an emotional issue."
Though she learned to develop a healthier relationship with food, Bure revealed recovery is always ongoing. "I'm a bulimic. And I still say I'm a bulimic," she admitted on a July 22 episode of her podcast last summer.
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Shawn Johnson
Shawn JohnsonCredit: Allen Berezovsky/WireImage
Along with her chance at Olympic gold came monumental pressure for Johnson — starting at a young age. While training as an adolescent and teen, she severely restricted her diet, eating no carbs or as few as 700 calories a day. "I was always the very strong, powerful, muscley, 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."
Once the 2008 Olympics were over, Johnson stopped her unhealthy eating habits and gained 20 lbs. But in March 2009, she was again thrust into the spotlight as a competitor on Dancing with the Stars, when she came under scrutiny from viewers. After a drop in self-confidence and relapse into drastic weight loss methods, Johnson became more confident in herself and her body with the support from a nutritionist, family, and then-fiancé/now-husband, Andrew East.
"Before him, I didn't voice any of this to anybody," Johnson told PEOPLE. "I knew I had unhealthy habits, but I don't think most people knew. 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."
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Molly Sims
Molly SimsCredit: Milla Cochran/startraksphoto.com
The former Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue model says that during her earlier days in the industry, she would do pretty much anything to stay at a size 0 — walking up to 14 miles a day to do so. "It was very difficult to stay the weight that you were supposed to stay," she told the Huffington Post in 2015. "For me, I'm genetically blessed in certain ways, but in terms of having the weight be a certain size 0, it was very hard. I didn't eat sometimes for a couple of days." After getting married and having children, Sims re-channeled her focus about her size into caring for her family.
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Portia de Rossi
Portia de RossiCredit: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
She's been working since her childhood, and de Rossi can date her struggles with eating back to the beginning of her career. "I didn't eat for 10 days before," de Rossi said in 2015 of her childhood modeling days.
"I'm up on this catwalk, and I'm a little kid and posing and trying to be sexy and strutting around and all the other models are making fun of my bushy eyebrows." She then continued to struggle with her eating disorder into adulthood, which she chronicled in her 2010 book, Unbearable Lightness.
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Hilary Duff
Hilary DuffCredit: Craig Barritt/Getty
Like many young stars, Duff admits that back in her teenage years, she definitely slipped into unhealthy territory when it came to eating. "I was too thin," Duff told PEOPLE in 2015. "That was not a healthy place for me. I was so unhappy. I remember my hands cramping because I wasn't getting enough nutrients."
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Nicole Scherzinger
Nicole ScherzingerCredit: JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty
It's not all song and dance for the former Pussycat Doll and Masked Singer judge. Scherzinger battled bulimia for eight years, at the height of Pussycat Dolls fame. "It is such a horrible, paralyzing disease and it was such a dark time for me," she told Cosmopolitan U.K. in August 2014.
"I didn't think anyone knew in my group or in my family because I hid it that well, I was so ashamed. I knew it wasn't normal or healthy because I was hurting myself through this cycle of disordered eating. It was my drug, my addiction. It's an endless vicious cycle." She's committed to doing things differently: "I'm never letting that happen again."
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