Jameela Jamil reveals long-term impact of anorexia

Yasmin Rufo

BBC News

• Published

  30 May 2024

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ddgl9vjrno

This 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."

Jameela hosted T4 on the Beach with Rick Edwards (left) and Nick Grimshaw in 2011

Jamil 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."