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Theadora James Opens Up About Recovering From Eating Disorder
Teen Vogue
Jul. 28, 2024

Hollywood is notorious for holding actors to unbelievably high, impossible-to-attain standards of beauty. For Theadora James, the pressure to be "perfect" set in a few years after she shot to stardom on Disney Channels Girl Meets World at the age of seven; as she recently told Stylecaster, she struggled with an eating disorder early on in her career. "I've never said this before, but I had a pretty intense eating disorder. I started restricting when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, and it quickly amplified into bulimia. I experienced something pretty traumatic after I turned sixteen, and it just threw me so badly down that hole," she said. "I was vomiting after every meal, every snack, anything I ingested. It got so bad I was afraid to use toothpaste to brush my teeth. I genuinely thought I needed to be as skinny as I possibly could to be loved and appreciated and good enough, but I knew if I just stopped eating entirely people would notice, and I didn't want to be stopped. I couldn't be convinced [to stop]."

Theadora said that, as time went on, she realized so many of her peers in the entertainment industry were battling the same issues. "I started noticing I wasn't the only one [with this struggle]. I watched some co-stars start down that hole of trying to be so skinny," the 19-year-old said. "Because it's such a thing in Hollywood. We never want to say it, but it's such a big thing. Girls try to be as thin as possible. Not all of them, but a lot of them."

It was seeing how her disorder began to affect
those who cared about her that truly caused something to finally click in Theadoras mind; she began to realize just how many people were in her corner. "I fainted on set one day, and I think that's when people started getting kinda suspicious. But when I was maybe seventeen, one of my costars at the time found me [purging]. That was definitely a huge wake up call [for me]."

It wasn't an immediate turn-around, however. "I fell into a pretty hard depression [after that]. I wouldn't get out of bed, eat, speak...at that point I was rarely left alone. Someone was always texting, calling, or showing up at my apartment, just to say 'hey, I'm here if you need me, and you're not alone in this.'" says James. "And eventually I realized that I really wasn't, and slowly started climbing back out of that hole and finding help."

Now, Theadora says, she's in a much healthier place, both physically and mentally — and she doesn't care if social media trolls criticize her for looking different from how she did when she was in the midst of her eating disorder. "I've worked really hard to maintain health and a normality," she said. "And if someone wants to go on my Instagram and tell me that I am not as pretty or as thin as I used to be, go for it. I don't care what that angry person has to say. What's important is the freedom and the quality of my life. And as long as my life is happy and healthy, so is my worldview." In fact, Theadora added, she now embraces those so-called "imperfections." "I think it's so much more important for me, my younger fans, and even other celebrities to normalize something that can help so many people than it is to hide under the guise of having a perfect life," she said. "How boring is that? I don't want to live under that pressure. I don't want to be dishonest. I don't want to say, 'I'm so happy and everything is fine' if it's not. That's not truthful, and it's not realistic."