Christina Applegate struggled with anorexia on ‘Married With Children,’ ate 5 almonds a day: ‘I wanted my bones to be sticking out’
Christina Applegate has “never discussed” her anorexia until now. The “Dead to Me” actress and Jamie-Lynn Sigler opened up about suffering from eating disorders on the latest episode of their “MeSsy” podcast.
“It was f – – king torture,” Applegate, 52, said. “I just deprived myself of food for years and years and years.”
Applegate revealed that her mom put her on Weight Watchers when she was 15, which was the same year “Married … With Children” debuted in 1987. Her struggles with body image began years earlier when she recalled a neighbor boy calling her fat.
“She was always competitive,” recalled Applegate of her mom. “If I got down to 110 [pounds], she’d be like… ‘How’d you do it?’ And the reason was, I had an eating disorder.”
Applegate “would eat five almonds in a day” at the time.
“And if I had six, I would cry, and I wouldn’t want to leave the house,” she explained. “And that stuck with me for years and years and years.”
The “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” lead starred on the sitcom alongside Ed O’Neill, Katey Sagal and David Faustino. The series ran for 11 seasons and aired more than 260 episodes.
Applegate played Al (O’Neill) and Peggy Bundy’s (Sagal) daughter, Kelly, who often received loud applause from the audience when she walked out on set. Kelly usually donned crop tops and short skirts, and the costume department at one point had to take in size 0 clothing to make sure it fit her properly.
“I wanted my bones to be sticking out, so I didn’t eat,” she revealed.
Her small frame was “very scary to everyone” behind the camera, Applegate went on.
“They were like, ‘Christina never eats.’ They talked to me about it,” she said on her podcast. “But to me, I was enormous.”
“Sopranos” alum Sigler, 42, meanwhile, suffered from an eating disorder as a teen, and it got worse when she saw herself in the pilot of the famed HBO show.
“I was the fullest I had been ever. I didn’t look like any other young woman on any other show that I’d seen,” she said. “There was a year between the pilot and the first episode and during that time, I had the eating disorder.”
When she returned a year later to film the first season, she claims she was nearly fired.
“Because of how thin I was,” she told Applegate. “They were like, ‘Whoa, no, no, no, no, no!’ The show was so supportive and loving, and they just wanted me healthy.” Sigler, at her smallest, was 80 pounds.
“Every notebook, if you had a notebook from my sophomore and junior year of high school has like little numbers on the corner of it, just calculating food and calories,” she recalled.
Applegate and Sigler grew close before debuting their podcast in March. The stars bonded over their respective battles with multiple sclerosis and often talk about their conditions on-air.
