Zosia Mamet Admits To An Eating Disorder In Column
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The star of the popular HBO comedy ‘Girls’ Zosia Mamet shared a huge secret in an informal column for Glamour magazine: the talented actress has been struggling with an eating disorder since childhood.
This struggle has been mostly a private one, a war nobody knew was raging inside me. I tried to fight it alone for a long time. And I nearly died. I was told I was fat for the first time when I was 8. 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. At times it has forced me to starve myself, to run extra miles, to abuse my body.
The 26-year-old Zosia is the daughter of Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet who eventually got her into a treatment program after telling her she was ‘not allowed to die.’’
It was the first time I realized 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.
Nowadays, Zosia Mamet understands that her disorder has nothing to do with weight – “that’s just the way the monster manifests itself.”
Really these diseases are about control: control of your life and of your body. For me ‘recovery’ was simply the flip side of the illness; everything was still focused on numbers and food. I was given a goal weight I had to reach by a certain date. Everything I ate was written down. And I did eat; I looked cured on the outside. But the monster inside wasn’t brought to trial. So I was given permission to leave the hospital and enter back into the world as a ‘healthy’ person. Then I went away for the summer and lost every pound I’d gained. Nobody had helped me dissect why I’d abused myself.
