Jamie-Lynn Sigler Quotes

A misperception about anorexia is that you don't eat. Not true. Maybe you eat just 500 calories a day. It would be easy for me to say, 'Why didn't my parents notice?' But I didn't want them to. I made sure to eat half a sandwich around my parents.

I wasn't strong enough to have an eating disorder. I tried to go anorexic for a good three hours. I ate ice and celery, but that's not even anorexic. And I quit. I was like, 'Ma, can you make me a sandwich? Like, immediately.'

I am not naturally that thin, so I had to go through everything from using drugs to diet pills to laxatives to fasting. Those were my main ways of controlling my weight.

I have permanent damage to my body because I wanted to be thin.

I was 85 lbs. at my 2000 homecoming dance. But I wanted my collarbones and hip bones to show more. I'd feel my hip bones to make sure they were out. If not, I had more weight to lose. I lost my period until I was 17. I loved that. It meant I wasn't healthy, and I didn't want to be healthy.

It was between the ages of 14 and 20 and I started off not eating at all, maybe an apple a day.

I was low-key abusing myself. The idea of being skinny became something that was most appealing to me. Even if you watch 'The Real,' from season 1 to season 4, I was always 100 lbs. I started to really work hard to stay petite and to not gain weight and to stay sample size.

I didn't choose to get anorexia. I may have made some childhood-like choices to try to control something. 'I know what I'll do: I'll just not eat.' That was the initial point, but then it spiraled and became a disease - not a choice by any means.

Anorexia, you starve yourself. Bulimia, you binge and purge. You eat huge amounts of food until you're sick and then you throw up. And anorexia, you just deny yourself. It's about control.

Weight was the thing I hyperfocused on. It went from me losing a few pounds to slowly over time losing more and more weight and becoming more and more focused on it.

As a teen, I was both anorexic and bulimic.

I was 17 when my body started changing, and I worried about what I did wrong. I went through a period where I didn't eat at all. I also had someone who was encouraging me to take diet pills. I pushed myself to the extreme because I woke up one day and had hips - and a butt - and thought, 'Oh my gosh, I'm getting fat!'

I must be an anorexic because an anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.

I don't think just being skinny means necessarily anorexic.

I'd lie in bed in my dormitory and grab at bits of my body, wanting to tear them off... I was so large by then that, in the heat, my thighs chafed together and bled. I was very unhappy, and yet no one ever asked me how I felt.

So I would always try and be the lightest I could. In high school, I really wouldn't eat. I would only have lunch and I would only have salads. And then it got so crazy as to just eating like a cracker or a cucumber a day and I would feel full.

I dare anybody to look at me and say I'm anorexic. I'm so totally not.

For many years, I was obsessed about what I was eating, how many calories it had, and how much exercise I'd have to do.

I tried being anorexic for four hours, and then I was like, I need some bagels.

The causes for my eating disorder ran along the usual lines: depression, an inability to express my rage, a desire to exert control, a desire to feel less, a desire to have my body express the things my voice could not. That, and I had gotten in the habit of believing it was better to take up less space.

I had a very unhealthy relationship with food that turned into bulimia.

You just don't eat until you feel like you're gonna throw up at every meal and all of a sudden the weight falls right off.

When I was a model at 15, I was eating one red pepper a day, and if I had a big day of castings, I would survive off a bag of Haribo, which gave me the 500 calories a day that would keep me alive. I was congratulated daily on my appearance - the more vertebrae upon my back you could count, the better my auditions went.

In the '80s, I did two hours of cardio every day, split between running and the stationary bike. It was a trap - afterward I'd feel starving but also bulletproof, so I'd pig out. I slid into what I call exercise bulimia, when you're running more and more miles so you can eat worse and worse food.

It's difficult, and it's an incredibly fine balance between getting your weight right down and being anorexic.