TikTok Star Alix Earle Breaks Silence On Her ‘Toxic Relationship’ With Food

TikTok star Alix Earle is opening up on her “toxic relationship” with food.

Although the 22-year-old social media personality shares a lot of photos and videos that feature her eating on Instagram, the aspiring model admitted that her eating habits are not as healthy as they could be.

In the third episode of her podcast, Hot Mess With Alix Earle, the TikTok star said that she wished she could go back to high school and give herself a “younger” self a hug after she described her “obsession” with being “paper thin” during her teenage years.

“This is something very personal and that I haven’t really talked about online before,” she said in comments transcribed by the Daily Mail. She explained that her younger self was “very different” than the person that she was now because she “wasn’t confident” with her appearance.

“Growing up, I never really had a problem with food, that was never really talked about in my family.  I had never thought that women need to diet or eat healthy, I just thought [you should] eat what you want, eat what you love,” she explained.

However, she said that extreme dieting became “normalized” to her when she watched her friends skipping lunch to lose weight. She said that she quickly became someone who “had a very healthy relationship with food” to someone who was constantly questioning if she was thin enough.

From age sixteen to eighteen, Alix admitted to using calorie trackers to manage her food intake and “would get stressed out” if she felt the “numbers went too high.” She said, “I was so obsessed with this dieting culture, I just went down such a bad path with myself, and my body, and my image.”

“I started to have this body dysmorphia, I would look in the mirror and see someone way bigger, and I was never happy with the person I saw in the mirror,” she continued, describing how she would “constantly” pinch the sides of her hips and her arms to see how much fat had accumulated there.

“I wish I could go back and hug myself because all that started to run through my mind, was food, calories, how to make meals small when I'm going to workout next,” she said, admitting that skipping lunch at school would often lead her to binge at home.

“I ate nothing at lunch, so I would come back home starving and eat everything,” she said, adding that her mind would then go “a million miles per hour trying to calculate how many calories I just consumed.” She then forced herself to throw up to feel better about binging.

“At the time, I didn’t understand what I had just started, this wasn’t me aware that this was an eating disorder, I didn’t know that other people who had eating disorders did this, I thought this was so clever,” she explained, admitting that she didn’t know what she was doing was “wrong” because her peers were going through the same thing.

“We wanted to be paper thin,” she said, explaining that the “worst” part of her struggle came around prom season. The day before prom began, Alix admitted that she only drank water for an entire day and ate ginger when she got hungry so that her stomach would be “as flat as possible” for the event.

Fortunately, most of her struggles “went away” when she got to college and met friends who taught her to have a healthy relationship with food again. “It’s been hard for me to comprehend it myself and I’ve only told it to a handful of people in my life,” she said, adding, “I knew I needed to stop and I did.”

Although she says that she is in the “best shape” of her life right now, she admits that comments about her weight are still triggering to her. She also finds it triggering when people say that she’s too thin or accuse her of not eating because it takes her back to her high school days.

Many fans thanked her for her candor in the comments of the YouTube video, with one fan writing, “As an almost 40-year-old woman this was the most relatable episode yet. Thank you for being so open and vulnerable about such a universal topic. In this new influencer era, I’m really proud for my teenage daughter to look up to you.”