TikTok star Alix Earle got emotional while revealing she suffered from an eating disorder in her “toxic” high school.
Earle explained that she “never had a problem with food” before high school, but around her sophomore year, she witnessed her classmates “paying thousands of dollars” to go on “extreme diets.”
“In my mind, I knew that this wasn’t normal at first, but after watching their habits and watching them lose weight and watching them be so satisfied over this, it became more normalized for me,” Earle admitted on Thursday’s episode of her “Hot Mess” podcast.
The influencer, who graduated from Red Bank Catholic High School in New Jersey, admitted that looking back, her school was a “very, very toxic environment when it came to girls’ relationships with food.”
“I went from someone who had a very healthy relationship with food very quickly to someone who did not,” she said.
Earle, 22, eventually transitioned from eating normal lunches to a small salad without dressing and counting her calories.
“I would get stressed out if the numbers got too high, I would buy juice cleanses, like I was just so obsessed with this dieting culture.
“I just went down such a bad path with myself, with my body, with my image, and I started to have this sort of body dysmorphia I would look in the mirror and I would see someone way bigger than the person that I was,” she continued.
Earle’s eating disorder worsened when she would come home from school hungry, binge eat and then purge after feeling “guilty” for consuming the calories.
“At the time I didn’t understand what I had just started,” she admitted, while adding that “no one knew that I was dealing with this eating disorder, and I didn’t really either.”
Earle found herself in a “very toxic cycle” of planning her meals, eating very little and then looking for the “nearest bathroom” to throw up.
“A majority of the girls in my friend group in high school all had an eating disorder, [and] we all thought it was healthy,” she remembered.
The University of Miami alum shared that her eating disorder was at its worst the month of prom when she would “not dare touch a single carb the whole entire month.”
“The day before prom, I did not eat anything,” she said. “I would just go on strictly like water diet and the only thing I would eat was ginger.”
Earle recalled “feeling so light headed” right before the big night and feeling “content,” because it meant she was “doing something right.”
She began to get emotional and wiped away tears while saying how she first realized that she needed to stop when her mom asked her about it, and she lied.
Earle was able to recover even more when going to college and meeting friends who “helped” her realize her habits were “not healthy.”
“I was just like so appreciative of the fact that I had girls telling me that it was OK to eat and we weren’t all gonna be competing with our bodies, and who was gonna weigh the least like that wasn’t a thing like that thought didn’t cross their mind, and I was so enamored by this I was like, ‘Wow this is so nice and refreshing and I don’t feel this toxic environment anymore,'” she said.
Over time, her thoughts about food began to go away, and she now feels “healthier and happier” than ever.
“I’m able to be at this great place now with food where I don’t really think about this at all so just bringing this back up for me is just bringing back so many emotions that I forgot that I had with food,” she said.
Earle began to cry once more while emphasizing how “grateful” she is for being in a better place.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call 988 or continue to contact Crisis Text Line by texting “NEDA” to 741741 to be connected with a trained volunteer at Crisis Text Line
