Jameela Jamil has revealed her battle with an eating disorder “destroyed” her bone density and damaged “my kidney, my liver, my digestive system, my heart”.
The British actress, 38, who began her career on Channel 4 hosting the T4 strand from 2009 until 2012, is now best known for her role on US sitcom The Good Place with Kristen Bell.
Speaking to chat show host Kelly Ripa on her Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, she said she “took so many laxatives” when she was battling anorexia that she damaged her health.
Jamil said she “developed a warped relationship with food”, when she was 11 after she was weighed in front of her class at school and her parents put her on a strict diet.
She said: “In their heads it came from a place of love, of we don’t want you to suffer because you stand out, we want you to fit in.”
She added: “Thinness is a form of assimilation, especially for women. I had never planned on being in the showbusiness industry and I can’t think of a worse industry for me to have entered with a history of eating disorders, given that to assimilate you’re supposed to be thin unless you want your identity to be the fact that you stand out for not being thin and that is the only thing we talk about.”
She added: “I stopped starving myself fully when I was 19 but still didn’t eat a proper meal until I was 30,” and said this made her “an exhausted, boring, naval-gazing obsessive person”.
She continued: “My TV career was my part-time career and my full-time career was staying thin.”
She said: “I took so many laxatives, I’m amazed I even still have an asshole, to be perfectly honest. It’s a real trooper. It’s a survivor.
“I took any pill or drink or diet that Oprah recommended, I did it, I took it. You know, any very low calorie supermodel diet.
She said her disordered eating “f***ed up my kidney, my liver, my digestive system, my heart. Most recently I found out I have destroyed my bone density”.
She continued: “I’m so sorry to my body that I have jeopardised my future so severely for a beauty standard and to try to fit in with other people.
“That’s why I’m so annoying publicly about eating disorders and diets because there’s so much talk about the dangers of being in a bigger body and there’s no talk almost about the dangers of not eating enough, only eating too much.”
