Getty ImagesThis story contains descriptions of eating disorders that some readers may find distressing.
Jameela Jamil has said her battle with an eating disorder has “destroyed” her bone density and damaged “my kidney, my liver, my digestive system, my heart”.
The actress added that she had taken “so many laxatives” in her teens that she was “amazed” she hadn’t done more damage to her digestive system.
Speaking to Kelly Ripa on her Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, Jamil said the condition started at a young age, after she had to weigh herself in front of her class for a school project.
Although she started eating more regularly at the age of 19, the star said she “still didn’t eat a proper meal until I was 30”.
Jamil admitted that anorexia had made her “an exhausted, boring, navel-gazing obsessive person” in her teens and early 20s.
“I took any pill or drink or diet that Oprah recommended,” she said.
“I did it, I took it. You know, any very low calorie supermodel diet.”
Getty ImagesJamil began her career on the UK’s Channel 4, hosting the youth-focused T4 strand from 2009 until 2012.
She said that, at the time, her “TV career was my part-time career and my full-time career was staying thin”.
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.”
The activist and actress now runs a podcast about mental health and body image where she has often spoken of her own battle with anorexia.
“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.”