Christina Applegate Reveals She Struggled with Anorexia on Married with Children: 'I Wanted My Bones to Be Sticking Out'

Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler are open about suffering from eating disorders that began in their teenage years.

“I just deprived myself of food for years and years and years,” Applegate said on the latest episode of MeSsy, her podcast with Sigler. “It was fucking torture.”

The Dead to me actress, who said she has “never discussed” her eating disorder in public, says her struggles with food and body image date back to childhood, when she recalled being called fat by a boy next door.

When she was 15 and just starting her 10-year streak Married with children, she says, her mom put her on Weight Watchers. “She was always competitive,” recalled Applegate, 52. “If I got down to 110 [pounds], she would say like… ‘How did you do that?’ And the reason was that I had an eating disorder. I would eat five almonds a day. And if I were six, I would cry and not want to leave the house. And that stayed with me for years and years and years.”

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Like her character Kelly Bundy on Married with childrenApplegate was often in short skirts and open tops and “I wanted my bones to stick out, so I wasn’t eating,” recalled Applegate, who said she suffered from anorexia at the time.

Applegate and Sigler’s podcast, MeSsy.

Production of wires

Her condition upset the cast and crew of the show: “It was very scary for everyone on the set because they were saying ‘Christina never eats’. They talked to me about it.”

Later, she says, she was so small that her size 0 clothes had to be worn to fit. “But for me, I was huge,” she said.

Sigler, 42, says her problems began as a teenager when “all my friends were talking about food and calories,” she recalled. “I just started taking notes.”

Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Christina Applegate, photographed for PEOPLE in March 2024.

John Russo

Her struggle intensified after she filmed the pilot episode The Soprano family 1997 and saw herself on the screen. “I was the fullest I’d ever been. I didn’t look like any other young woman on any other show I’d seen,” she said. “It was a year between the pilot and the first episode, and during that time I had an eating disorder.”

Sigler says she suffered from exercise bulimia, where she would compulsively exercise after eating. And she would record everything she consumed. “Every notebook, if you had a notebook from my sophomore and junior year of high school, has little numbers in the corner, just calculating food and calories,” she said.

Christina Applegate with Married With Children co-stars David Faustin, Ed O’Neill and Katey Sagal in 1998.

Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty

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When Sigler returned a year later to film the show’s first season, “they almost fired me because of how thin I was,” she says, adding that at one point she was down to 80 pounds. “They were like, ‘whoa, no, no, no, no, no!’ The show was full of support and love and they just wanted me to be healthy.”

Jamie-Lynn Sigler in The Sopranos in 2007.

HBO/Everett

Applegate, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021 and has since become close friends with Sigler, who also lives with the disease, says she was in her 30s before she no longer felt controlled by her eating disorder.

But, she says, after the side effects of MS and the drugs for the disease caused her to gain 45 pounds, “the demon in my head comes back very loudly and it scares me,” she said. “I have to be aware of it so I don’t develop bad habits of self-harm.”

That “demon” was there, taunting her, when she walked onto the Emmys stage in January, she says. After receiving a standing ovation, Applegate joked to the crowd about her appearance: “The body is not from Ozempico.”

She said in the podcast that the joke was a defense mechanism. “I was making jokes at the Emmys because… it was like I could see what they were thinking… and I was so humiliated. A demon tells me these things.”

Christina Applegate at the Emmy Awards, January 15, 2024.

Kevin Winter/Getty

Talking about their fears and struggles “is a good thing, because no one talked about it with me,” said Sigler, who added that for her, “the food thing was about control, but as soon as I started I was just more confident about it. what I am… I could get rid of a lot.”

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Applegate, who recalled having leg liposuction when she was about 26 (“I had a little, little, little, little, little fat on my back leg. And our doctor actually did this surgery on me.”) says she wants to take care that her daughter, Sadie, is growing up with different messages.

“I don’t want my daughter to see me not eating,” she said. “I’ve been very clear about … trying not to put myself down … I’ve had low self-esteem issues my whole life. I don’t want that for my child,”

Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, photographed for PEOPLE, March 2024.

John Russo

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, visit NationalEatingDisorders.org. If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the text crisis line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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Source: HIS Education