Christina Applegate fasted for years while appearing on “Married…With Children.”
The actress, who played rebellious teenager Kelly Bundy on the raunchy sitcom from 1987 to 1997, writes about her struggle with an eating disorder in her newly published memoir, You With the Sad Eyes.
“If I wanted to eat something hideously huge, like a bagel, I would scoop it up and eat half, or half of half,” she writes. “That’s enough food for me for one day.”
“Sometimes I would punish myself and not eat at all. I was a size 0, and the costumers on Married…with Children often had to dress me,” she continues.
“I was bones, bones, bones. Back then, I used to joke that if you didn’t have hip bones when you first walked into a room, you were too fat.”
Applegate shared, “I dug myself in that character, though,” and told readers, “I had to lose weight.”
“I had a specific vision of what I wanted her to wear, and in order to dress her in a way that would reveal her if she ate something as small as a grape, I had to lean deeper into my eating disorder,” she explains in her confessional memoir.
Sadly, the Bad Moms star confessed that she was “never happy” with her body and began wearing “tighter” and “shorter” clothing, often wearing a bikini, sparking a reaction from the studio audience.
“By Season 5, oh my god, I could walk into the living room wearing a leather fringed jacket over a short red shirt, like I did in Episode 13, ‘The Godfather,’ and have a five-second break in the scene while the crowd screams greedily at me,” she recalls.
“I look at all of this now and cringe. This show was certainly broad and mean. There are no hell of a shot being made now.”
Throughout the book, Applegate also shares portions of her diary entries from that period.
“I’m losing weight, but I can’t see it, but I’m compulsive about it,” she wrote as a teenager. “I mean, I’m not throwing up food or anything. But I’m scared to eat and I shouldn’t eat. I just don’t want to go back to how I was… I want to completely change my appearance. I don’t want to look at myself anymore.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, call the toll-free ANAD Helpline at 1-888-375-7767.
