Christina Applegate details anorexia battle while starring on 'Married... With Children': 'I'd punish myself'
Christina Applegate starved herself for years while starring in “Married… With Children.”
The actress — who played rebellious teenager Kelly Bundy on the bawdy sitcom from 1987 to 1997 — wrote about dealing with an eating disorder in her newly released memoir, “You With the Sad Eyes.”
“If I was going to eat something as horrendously huge as a bagel, I would scoop it out and maybe have half of it, or half of a half,” she writes. “That would be my food intake for an entire day.”
Christina Applegate writes about having an eating disorder as a teen and young woman in her newly released memoir. ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection
The actress says her eating disorder began while starring in the hit series “Married…With Children” (pictured here with some of the cast in 1996). Getty Images
“Sometimes I’d punish myself and wouldn’t eat at all. I was a size 0, and the costume people on ‘Married… With Children’ would often have to take my clothes in,” she continues.
“I was bone, bone, bone. I used to joke back then that if my hip bones weren’t the first thing to enter a room, I was overweight.”
Applegate shares that she “dug herself into a hole with that character, though,” telling readers that she “had to be skinny.”
Applegate (pictured above on the set of “Married… With Children”) played Kelly Bundy on the bawdy sitcom. ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I had a vision of the specific clothes I wanted her to wear, and to wear those clothes — clothes that would show if you ate something as tiny as a single grape — I had to lean even deeper into my eating disorder,” she explains in her tell-all memoir.
Sadly, the “Bad Moms” star confesses that she was “never satisfied” with her body and began wearing “tighter” and “shorter” clothes, often donning bikinis, prompting a response from the studio audience.
“By Season 5, my God: I could walk into the living room, as I did in episode 13, ‘The Godfather,’ in a leather fringed jacket over a short red shirt and there would be a five-second break in the scene while the crowd hollered lustily at me,” she recalls.
The actress (pictured above on set of the sitcom) recalled sometimes eating half of a scooped-out bagel and nothing else for an entire day. ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection
Applegate’s book, out now, is titled “You with the Sad Eyes.”
“I look at all this now and cringe. The show was indeed broad and lewd, and it wouldn’t have a shot in hell of being made these days.”
Throughout the book, Applegate also shares some of her diary entries from that period of her life.
“I’m losing weight, but I can’t see it. I’m getting compulsive about it though,” she wrote as a teen. “I mean, I’m not puking my food up or anything. But I’m afraid to eat, and I shouldn’t eat, I just don’t want to gain it back…I want to completely change my appearance. I hate to look at myself anymore.”
