“Self-love is a constant journey,” says Outer Banks star Madelyn Cline, 22. It’s certainly true for the actress, who opened up about her past struggle with an eating disorder and subsequent recovery in a new Body Scan video for Women’s Health.
It all started during her teenage years. “When I was younger I did struggle with eating disorders, specifically when I was a teenager. I think I was around 16 when I started working out a lot,” she says. “I would wake up every morning at 5 a.m. and I would work out for 30 minutes. It was super rigorous cardio every day.”
When she didn’t get the results or specific body shape she was looking for, she started restricting her eating, too. “I started cutting calories. I would eat like six almonds for breakfast because I didn’t want to counteract the cardio that I just did.”
Madelyn says it progressed further. “It turned into not feeding myself protein and not feeding my body what it needed when I was working out so much.” She was also dancing and weight-lifting. “I worked out multiple times during the day. All I knew was I wasn’t achieving a particular body image, and so I was angry. I was harming myself and starving myself in the process of trying to achieve that.”
She says it was an awful place to be as a teen, idolizing a specific, unrealistic body type. Eventually, with the help of her family, she realized, “there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re just not built that way, and that’s perfectly fine.”
Her mother played a big role in her recovery. “My mom was a wonderful help in that. She would stand there in the mirror with me and we would list out things that I liked about my body,” she says. “After that repetition those things became solidified in my mind. I like my curves, I like my hips, and after a while I started to love my body. I became so much happier.”
Watch Madelyn talk more about her journey toward self-love in the video above.
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