As two women who became famous in their teen years, Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler know the damage growing up in the public eye can do. So often, young women in the spotlight are unfairly scrutinized for their bodies, which has only gotten worse in the age of social media. Now, both women are opening up about battling eating disorders in their younger years, and how sometimes those thoughts still pop up. Christina, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, admitted that the disease has brought up a lot of her past weight issues. She’s now giving her teenage daughter credit for keeping her from going back to her old ways.
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Christina has had lifelong issues with body image.
“I just deprived myself of food for years and years and years,” Christina admitted during the most recent episode of MeSsy, the podcast she cohosts with Jamie-Lynn. “It was f—ing torture.”
Christina shared that she’s “never discussed” her eating disorder publicly before, but that her body image issues go all the way back to childhood, when she remembers a neighbor boy calling her fat.
She admitted to a decades-long battle with her eating disorder.
At the age of 15, Christina landed the role that would make her famous: Kelly Bundy on Married with Children, who she played for 10 years. When she started on the show, her “competitive” mom put her in Weight Watchers. “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,” Christina confessed.
“I wanted my bones to be sticking out, so I didn't eat,” she shared, admitting she was suffering from anorexia at that time.
Jamie-Lynn admitted she 'didn't look like' young women on TV in the '90s.
Jamie-Lynn shared her own experiences struggling with her body image as a teen when she noticed that “all my friends were talking about food and calories.” For her, things came to a head after filming the pilot for The Sopranos in 1997, where she claims she found herself “the fullest I had been ever.”
“There was a year between the pilot and the first episode and during that time, I had the eating disorder,” she admitted.
She had a different kind of eating disorder.
She was dealing with exercise bulimia, where she’d force herself to work out after every meal. She had gotten down to about 80 pounds, and admitted, “they almost fired me because of how thin I was.”
“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 shared.
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Christina's MS diagnosis affected her eating disorder, but she's keeping it in check for her kid.
After gaining 45 pounds due to side effects from MS and the medication she takes for the disease, Christina said “the demon in my head is coming back really loud and it's scaring me.” She confessed that she made jokes about herself at the Emmys as a defense mechanism, because she felt “so humiliated.”
But it’s important for her to fight the demon for her 13-year-old daughter Sadie. “I don't want my daughter to see me not eat,” she said. “I've been really clear about …trying not to put myself down … I have bad self-esteem issues and have my whole life. I don't want that for my kid.”
