‘Little People, Big World’: Isabel Roloff Reveals Eating Disorder Struggle

Isabel Roloff, the wife of former Little People Big World star Jacob Roloff, shared a deeply personal statement with fans on Instagram Wednesday, going into details about her eating disorder struggle in her teens. Roloff, 24, included a 10-year-old photo of herself at a scary weight when she was 14, compared to a more recent photo of herself. She said she was “starving” herself at 14, and reminded her fans that you do not need to be the same weight you were as a teenager for the rest of your life.

“For a long time, I have had to remind myself that I was still growing at that age, that I was still developing, and I was also starving myself… it’s nothing to strive for now that I am older, happier, and healthier. This is recovery from an eating disorder,” Roloff wrote. She later noted that we often give ourselves “unattainable goals” and then “wonder why are continuously unhappy.” When she took the photo of herself at 14, Roloff thought “I was fat” and she needed to go on a diet. “Now I look at it and I can see that I was literally wasting away,” she wrote.

A decade after the throwback photo was taken, Roloff is in a much better place. “My body has taken me on 8-mile hikes, my body has held the hands of those I love, my body has given me so, so much and still I spend so much time trying to change her or wish that she were smaller,” she wrote. Roloff, finished her post by reminding her fans they might face the “little voice in our heads may start telling us that all the extra food we are eating is unnecessary” during the winter months.

“I just wanted to remind whoever needs to hear it, your body is fine exactly as it is, today, right now. You need to eat. You can rest. Please give yourself all of your unconditional love,” she wrote. “You are worthy of that.” In the end, Roloff added a heart emoji.

Roloff’s Instagram post came after an Instagram Story statement she published earlier this month in response to a troll who said Roloff “put on a lot of weight.” In her response, Roloff said she saw the comment on an “especially bad body day” and cried, so she removed the photo the troll commented on. “THIS S— IS NOT OKAY. I will call it out every time because there is a misconception that people with a lot of followers should not expect it but accept it and I never will,” Roloff wrote at the time, reports The Sun. “I don’t share these for pity or ‘you’re beautiful! comments.’ I share these to expose the dark side of social media/life in the ‘public eye’ where people think they can comment [on] whatever they want about people’s bodies.”