Girls actress Zosia Mamet has revealed that she suffers from a life-threatening eating disorder that once left her feeling suicidal.
In a frank interview, the star revealed that being called "fat" as an eight-year-old sparked the condition and that she "nearly died" in her teens.
“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,” she explained.
"As a teenager, I used to stand in front of the refrigerator late at night staring into that white fluorescent light, debilitated by the war raging inside me: whether to give in to the pitted hunger in my stomach or close the door and go back to bed. I would stand there for hours, opening and closing the door, taking out a piece of food then putting it back in; taking it out, putting it in my mouth, and then spitting it into the garbage. I was only 17, living in misery, waiting to die.”
She added that it was the intervention of her father David that caused her to address the issue.
"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 realised 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 may never disappear completely but hopefully one day it’ll be so quiet, it’ll only be a whisper and I’ll wonder, ‘Was that just the wind?’"
