Teresa Palmer bravely discusses eating disorder that left her obsessed with healthy food
Australian actress Teresa Palmer has opened up about suffering from orthorexia, which led to her obsessing about ingredients in food and cutting out entire food groups
Teresa Palmer has bravely spoken out on suffering from an eating disorder.
The Australian actress, 34, has revealed that she used to battle eating disorder orthorexia – where people become obsessed with healthy eating.
Symptoms of orthorexia, which is not formally recognised as an eating disorder, include compulsively checking ingredients lists as well as cutting out entire food groups and spending hours thinking about food.
Speaking on the Mamamia Me Before You podcast this week, the 34-year-old said that from 2009 to 2012, she “was in a very unhealthy relationship with food”.
“So I had orthorexia,” the star told.
“Not many people have heard of it, but it is an eating disorder,” she explained.
“I was incredibly clean with my eating, so I didn’t have anorexia or bulimia, but I had something different, which is when you become so obsessed with the amount of calories you’re putting into your body, everything had to be of the highest quality. I wouldn’t eat anything stripped of its nutritional value.”
Teresa added: “It was exhausting, utterly exhausting, to log every calorie and to just be so overly conscious of the food I was putting into my body.”
The Warm Bodies actress explained that her disorder began after an agent told her back in 2008 that she needed to work out more following paparazzi bikini snaps photos circulated.
“She said, ‘Do you know what? You should start working out, because that’s a part of your job. You need to make sure that you look really good.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I thought I did look good.'”
“The scary thing is that I’ve always been such a small person, I look back on the photos that she’s talking about and I was just so little still. Yes, I wasn’t perfectly sculpted, but that really set off this huge whirlwind of unhealthy obsession surrounding food.”
The Warm Bodies star – who is mother to three kids with husband Mark Webber – then went on to tell that having children led to her facing her battle with body image and food.
“My body just blossomed and I had this big belly and I could feel life within me, and it was just incredible seeing what my body could do,” she said of pregnancy. “I was getting stretch marks on my boobs and cellulite all over my bum and the backs of my thighs.”
“I was finally liberated from these judgements that I had surrounding my body, which I realized had existed since I was … a teenager,” she said. “Since being a mum, I’ve embraced it all. The lumps and the bumps and the stretch marks… it’s a map of my journey of bringing my babies into the world.”
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