Christina Applegate Opens up About Her Anorexia Battle

Christina Applegate has been open and candid about her journey living with multiple sclerosis (MS) over the past few years, and now the actress is speaking out for the first time about her battle with anorexia. During a recent episode of the MeSsy podcast, Applegate shared with co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler, “I just deprived myself of food for years and years and years,” adding, “It was torture. It was f—ing torture.”

Applegate revealed that, at the age of 15, her mother had her go on Weight Watchers. “She was always competitive,” the 52-year-old actress said. “If I got down to 110 [pounds….], she’d be like… ‘How’d you do it?’ And the reason was, I finally had an eating disorder. I would eat five almonds in a day. And if I had six, I would cry, and I wouldn’t want to leave the house. And that stuck with me for years and years and years.”

During her time playing Kelly Bundy on Married with Children, Applegate confessed that she had a desire to look skinny, as her character regularly wore revealing clothing. “I wanted my bones to be sticking out, so I didn’t eat,” she shared.

“It was very scary to everyone on set because they were like, ‘Christina never eats.’ And I didn’t,” Applegate added. “They talked to me about it.” The actress explained that the show’s costume department altered her outfits to be smaller than size zero, but “to me, I was enormous,” she said.

Sadly, Applegate admitted that she struggles with body image issues after her MS diagnosis led her to gain 45 pounds from side effects from both the disease and the medication she was prescribed. “That demon in my head, it’s coming back really loud. And it’s scaring me,” she said. “It hasn’t been there for a long time. I mean, it’s always a little bit there with anorexia as long as I did in my early life. It always plagues me. And then body dysmorphia and all of those things. They’re still always there.”

“I don’t look in mirrors,” the Dead to Me actress continued. “This is obviously something people don’t know. I have writing all over my mirrors in my bathroom so that I don’t look in them. Because I will like fall on the ground and cry.”

Finally, Applegate explained that, in order to deal with her feelings over gaining weight, she has used humor as a defense mechanism during public appearances, such as telling the 2024 Emmy Awards audience that she had a “body not by Ozempic.”

“I made jokes at the Emmys because I wanted to say, ‘I know what you’re thinking,’” Applegate said. “Had to say that because it was like I could see what they were thinking … I was so humiliated.” She added, “That’s the demon. The demon is saying these things to me.”