Zosia Mamet has revealed she’s suffered from an eating disorder since childhood.
“I’ve struggled with an eating disorder since I was a child,” the “Girls” star, 26, admitted in her column in the September issue of Glamour. “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.”
The actress goes on to describe how her nearly two-decade-long struggle began.
“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.”
As a teen, Zosia would torture herself each night, standing in front of her family’s refrigerator and staring at the food she wouldn’t allow herself to eat.
It was when her father, writer and director David Mamet, stepped in that she finally got help.
“My dad eventually got me into treatment,” the actress wrote. “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.”
It’s taken a lot of work, but Zosia has been able to control her problems. The biggest challenge she faced was realizing that her issue was not necessarily with food or her weight, but with control.
But while she has come a long way since her teens, the actress admits that this is something she, and the 30 million other women who have an eating disorder, will fight the rest of their lives.
“I’m an addict in recovery,” she wrote. “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.”