
Growing up in a reality TV family wasn’t always easy, but Jinger Duggar has come a long way. In the former Counting On star’s new book, People Pleaser, she opens up about times in her life when she struggled with insecurity, and now, she’s opening up about a big one. During a new podcast appearance this week, Jinger admitted that she felt she was “too fat” as a preteen and teenager, and it led her down a dark path.
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Jinger said being a people pleaser was at the root of her struggles with food.
While appearing on the Unplanned podcast this week, Jinger told hosts Matt and Abby Howard that when she was younger, there was a period of time she wasn’t eating enough “because I thought I was too fat – and I wasn’t.”
“It was a thought process of wanting to belong and wanting to have those friendships that were genuine,” she said. “At some point, we realized, ‘OK, well, we were designed for community.’ That’s a good thing, [and] we weren’t designed to live on an island by ourselves. We’re supposed to be in community with other people.”
Jinger often compared herself to her friends.
As she was worried about not being “pretty enough” or “skinny enough,” Jinger said she started avoiding meals.
“I was in the ages of, like, 13, 14, 15 [and] I had friends who naturally were super skinny and I would look at these girls and would compare myself to them,” she said on the podcast. “I was actually pretty skinny at that point. I wouldn’t gain weight easily, but I thought I might. It was that fear of just, like, ‘I wasn’t as skinny as them, but I was still healthy.’ It was that comparison that started to happen in my mind. I didn’t think properly about myself.”
She admitted that her days were 'consumed' with thoughts of food.
“I felt miserable because I was thinking, ‘OK, I don’t want to eat’ or I would think, ‘If I went to somebody else’s house, then I’d be [thinking about] what we were going to eat [and] am I going to have something that’s going to not make me fat?’” she said.
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Finally, she decided to ask her mom for help.
After struggling with this problem for “many months,” Jinger decided to tell her mom, Michelle, what she was going through, and because Michelle had struggled with bulimia in the past, she was able to understand where her daughter was coming from.
“It was so helpful because she did not go from one extreme to the other, where she was just telling me, ‘OK, now you need to eat everything in sight.’ She didn’t force me to eat things that were unhealthy,” Jinger said on the podcast. “She’s like, ‘Jinger, I really appreciate you telling me that,’ but she came up with a plan [to] ‘text me what you eat every day and I’d love to be accountable too, and I’ll text you what I eat.’”
With her mom's help, Jinger said she was able to 'develop a healthy relationship with food.'
“I started to feel better [and had] more energy,” she said. “Just enjoying life again because I wasn’t thinking about food and then when I got to somebody’s house and they had something I typically wouldn’t eat or it was super greasy or unhealthy, I’d be like, ‘I’m OK, I’m going to eat this and it doesn’t matter.’”
It’s good to hear that Jinger was able to get back on the right track and learn how to feel good in her own skin. Self-esteem is a huge battle for everyone in those early teenage years, so Jinger certainly wasn’t alone.