Christina Applegate Reveals She Struggled with Anorexia on Married with Children: ‘I Wanted My Bones to Be Sticking Out’

14 comments

1. [removed]

2. Sucks when you have a world renowned beauty still thinking she wasn’t enough

3. Man it really is true that everyone has a podcast these days. Christina’s I will definitely check out though. Very curious to know how things are going for her with all the health issues.

4. Understandable. Tracy Gold from Growing Pains was vocal about her ED struggles back in the day. It helped me to know I wasn’t alone. Doesn’t help that the camera adds pounds. I remember someone commenting I looked smaller compared to my senior cheerleading photo. I had LOST WEIGHT since the photo taken a couple months before. Sucks extra hard to be on camera I would guess.

5. People forget what a force heroin-chic was in the 90s

6. As someone with MS I’m sure she’s wondering if the way she treated her body helped cause her MS. I know I question it all the time still, even years after diagnoses.

7. I think it was Helen Mirren who said one of her biggest regrets was stressing over her weight for years, and not being able to eat and enjoy food as she wished.

   I think that a lot of actresses are like that. That period where they were at their ‘hottest’ and possibly most successful was also the most stressful, the most struggling, the hardest time of their lives, in spite of their success.

8. She was famous in a time where stick thin was in. Kate Moss was in. The way so many people idolized jutting hip bones, collar bones, visible ribs was tragic. JLo has her flaws, but to my memory, it was JLO who really started introducing the idea that curvy (and non visible bones) could be beautiful. Looking back on it now, I wonder how many lives she may have saved by becoming popular when she did.

9. That’s very sad. Our beauty standards fucked up way too many people’s perception of themselves, including celebrities (case in point, huh?)

   You’d think we’d be better about this sort of thing after Karen Carpenter’s death, but I remember being a kid in the 2000s and hearing anorexia jokes everywhere. It disturbs me how indifferent we were to all that, and it’s even worse that at that time, I myself made jokes about supermodels eating an ice cube and self-inducing vomit.

   I know we’ve gotten better about this issue, but I still think we’re long overdue for a reckoning on it, because eating disorders are a pressing issue at the moment.

10. As someone whose body is looking pretty pre-MS, arms losing strength and all that jazz and having struggled with anorexia as a gay teen, Christina Applegate is my hero at this point.

11. Instead, she left a legion of young men with that problem…

12. To this day I still struggle with ED triggers. It took reading Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died to understand some background to the way I view my body. I’m happy to say I haven’t stepped on a scale in months. I exercise and eat healthy. The number on the scale no longer defines my self worth.

13. Quick shoutout to Christina Applegate!

14. I’m sure all the jokes on the show about Katey Sagal somehow being called fat really helped…