Girls star Zosia Mamet has revealed her personal struggle with anorexia in her latest column for Glamour magazine.
The 26-year-old Mad Men actress describes how she began to suffer from the eating disorder as a young girl.”I’ve struggled with an eating disorder since I was a child. This struggle has been mostly a private one, a war nobody knew was raging inside me. I tried to fight it alone for a long time. And I nearly died.”
“I was told I was fat for the first time when I was eight,” she wrote. “I’m not fat; I’ve never been fat. But ever since then, there has been a monster in my brain that tells me I am — that convinces me my clothes don’t fit or that I’ve eaten too much. At times it has forced me to starve myself, to run extra miles, to abuse my body.”
Fortunately, Zosia dad, playwright and director David Mamet stepped in to help his daughter battle the disease. ”
“My dad eventually got me into treatment, she revealed. “He came home one night from a party, took me by the shoulders, and said, ‘You’re not allowed to die.’ It was the first time I realized this wasn’t all about me. I didn’t care if I died, but my family did. That’s the thing about these kinds of disorders: They’re consuming; they make you egocentric; they’re all you can see.”
As for how she copes with the effects of her body dysmorphia issues now, Zosia describes herself as “addict in recovery,” and stresses that as a society, “we’ve brought other addictions into the light; we’ve talked about them, dissected them, made them acceptable issues to discuss and work out. We need to treat eating disorders just as seriously.”
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