Angela Scanlon has revealed she had an eating disorder for 15 years.
In her new book Joyrider, which is part memoir and part self-help, the Irish presenter got candid about her battles with anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder for the first time.
In an excerpt from the book, published by the Irish Independent, Angela wrote: “I managed to paint a decent picture and life looked good. I got the big entertainment TV job, I had a hair ad, I did all the glossy red-carpet things and I was more miserable than I have ever been in my life.”
The 38-year-old continued: “I have lived for many years split in two: my outside face beaming and smiling, relentlessly positive; inside in turmoil. I would put my mask on and do the thing, then come home and crawl back into a shell that felt like a foreign country.”
“I felt like the two versions were me, but one was acceptable, and one wasn’t. One was loveable and one wasn’t. One was tolerable and one was repulsive.”
“People see me on telly and my ‘brand’ — and I say that in quotation marks — is very upbeat and positive, which is absolutely part of me. But I think people assume that means there’s no suffering and there’s no pain or there’s none of the difficulties that they might feel.”
“I wished [when I was younger] that I knew somebody who I could relate to who was open enough to go, you can do all these things and also have felt all these things.”
Angela revealed her anorexia and bulimia started when she was at school, where she heard a girl talk about eating and throwing up afterwards in the school toilets.
She explained: “It was weird to begin with — it was experimental and I kind of felt like it was something I was just dabbling in, so I could kind of say, ‘Oh, I’ve tried that’.”
Angela recalled living on “black coffee and canned pineapple” in her late teens, and said she would sometimes snack on “an apple or a box of raisins” if she felt weak.
“My eating disorder gave me something I could control, all day, every day. It seduced me into believing it was me who held the wheel,” she writes in her book.
The Ask Me Anything host said when she was older, she “cured” herself of her eating disorder and instead put all her time and energy into her work and career.
Angela revealed she became “obsessed” with her work and never stopped, describing it as “a binge with no end in sight”.
She eventually went to therapy and said she is now enjoying life more, revealing her happiness is now dependent on a “slightly more balanced view of life”.
Joyrider by Angela Scanlon will be published by Vermilion on May 12 at €19.99.
If you have been affected by anything in this article, please visit BodyWhys.ie, or else call their helpline 01-2107906.
