“Modern Family” star Julie Bowen is revealing her teenage struggles with an eating disorder.
The 52-year-old actress stopped by “The Tamron Hall Show,” where she highlighted the similarities she sees in herself and her sons: Oliver, 15, and 13-year-old twins Gustav and John, whom she shares with ex-husband Scott Phillips.
She explained that one in all her sons is “all the time attempting to color contained in the lines and get the A+” identical to she did at that age — only together with her body image.
“I feel [as a teen] I interpreted being messy or making mistakes or having an ass or, like, a bit of fat coming out of the highest of your jeans [as] an emblem that you simply couldn’t contain yourself,” Bowen reasoned on Thursday’s episode.
“That you just were an excessive amount of, and that to be good meant staying contained in the lines — literally and figuratively. Keeping it tight. Keeping all the pieces tight. And that’s my attitude, was tight. And by the best way, that just isn’t fun. It’s not a fun solution to live,” she added.
Looking back, the “Joyful Gilmore” star thinks she was fighting puberty and “not liking that feeling of fixing.” She said she ended up in a facility to get help.
“We didn’t discuss anything, and it just type of felt like… dirty,” she said about caring for her body. “And I noticed, while you’re really ravenous, you don’t have any feelings. It’s kind of fantastic. The body goes, ‘We don’t have time for that.’ So I feel it was a coping mechanism.”
Bowen also recalled the “nasty” way her body was analyzed within the media just months after she gave birth to her twins in 2009.
“I used to be lucky enough to get a bit of little bit of fame and recognition before everybody had a mobile phone of their pocket and a camera on a regular basis,” she laughed before sharing a terrifying example.
“I had my twins in 2009, and I used to be in Hawaii. We were shooting ‘Modern Family.’ It was lower than a yr later, and I still had, like, the newborn gunk,” Bowen remembered.
“I used to be working. I used to be breastfeeding, and I jumped within the ocean with my husband on the time wearing a bikini — nobody was around — and by the point we got as much as the room, there had been paparazzi, like, within the rocks hidden away, and it was the nastiest. Like, ‘What’s flawed together with her? That is disgusting.’”
As a part of her press tour to advertise JB SKRUB, her latest skincare line geared toward teenage boys, Bowen revealed on “The View” this week that she “finally got her stomach fixed” when “Modern Family” led to 2020, 11 years after giving birth to her twins.
“They ripped it open, the twins just ripped it,” she said, pointing to her stomach. “And I said, as soon as ‘Modern Family’ is finished … I’ll get it fixed. But it surely was 11 years!”
“You look snatched! You look good,” said co-host Sunny Hostin, who recently got here clean about her own plastic surgeries in an try to destigmatize them.
For those who or someone you like is fighting an eating disorder, you’ll be able to get help. Call the National Eating Disorder Association helpline at (800) 931-2237 or visit nationaleatingdisorders.org.