Exclusive | Hilaria Baldwin divulges the extremes she took during 20-year eating disorder — including counting toothpaste calories
Hilaria Baldwin’s eating disorder became so severe that she was counting the calories in her toothpaste.
The yoga instructor detailed her 20-year struggles during an exclusive Page Six Radio interview Tuesday morning.
“I did all of it. I did anorexia, I did bulimia, I did overeating, I did undereating,” Baldwin told co-hosts Danny Murphy and Evan Real, noting that it got so bad at one point that she was “afraid of how many calories might be in toothpaste.”
Baldwin, now 42, divulged that she “started dieting” at age 5.
The “Nation’s Dumbest” star — who shares seven children with husband Alec Baldwin — added that as she got older, she “really struggled” with not knowing when she was hungry or full.
“I look back and I looked fine,” she recalled. “But I thought I was a whale [back then]. I just thought there was something broken inside of me.”
The “Dancing With the Stars” alum told us that she did “a lot of the work” to overcome her eating disorder before she began having kids, crediting her ADHD for making her “hyper-focused” on healing.
“I don’t want to live this way; I’m miserable,” she recalled feeling amid her struggles. “I can’t have good relationships, I can’t have good friendships, I can’t eat out to dinner with people. It’s just so, so, so stressful.”
Hilaria told us that she “didn’t want to pass” those same struggles onto her kids, so she makes it a point to have open and honest conversations with them about food.
“What I try to do with my kids is empower them, talk about strength, talk about, ‘How does the food make you feel?’” Hilaria explained.
While she doesn’t always approve of her children eating unhealthy snacks like Cheetos, she doesn’t “shame” them for indulging either.
In fact, Hilaria said she “can’t wait” to post a video of her and her youngest daughter digging into two pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in the late hours of the night — an act she would have previously been “afraid” of doing.
The “Baldwins” star first opened up about her past struggles with eating disorders in her 2016 memoir, “The Living Clearly Method.”
She expanded on her healing journey in a 2018 Instagram post.
“I have found that being healthy is about not focusing on weight and rather on how I feel, how strong I am, and how healthy I am,” she wrote at the time. “Weight and how you look are side effects. Not the main focus. When I started focusing on health, my obsession with weight went away. They should not be confused.”
