Christina Applegate, who has been living with multiple sclerosis since 2021, is detailing her complicated relationship with her body.
The actress, 54, opened up about her journey with MS — an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system — in her new memoir, You with the Sad Eyes (out Tuesday, March 3), and revealed she’s struggled with her weight ever since being diagnosed.
In an excerpt published by The Guardian on Sunday, March 1, the Married… with Children alum explained that even though she was usually a size zero growing up, she always experienced body dysmorphia.
“My relationship with food is so much better than it ever was, but it took a long time to improve,” she wrote in You with the Sad Eyes.
However, she explained, “When the MS hit, the stability I’d fought so hard for went haywire. I had to take 15 hours of steroid infusions, and immediately everything just went like a f**king blob.”
Applegate, who often walks with a cane due to her compromised motor skills from MS, said in her book that she “didn’t even look” like herself by the time she went to receive her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in November 2022.
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“The day I got my star was about the first time anyone had seen me since my diagnosis, and I felt humiliated,” she admitted. “I thought I’d even have to go off the rack for the ceremony — and no one goes off the rack in this town — until Christian Siriano came to my rescue and made me something beautiful to wear.”
“I hated how I looked that day, how much this illness had taken from me, but this was my Oscar, after all. It was time to step out in public,” she wrote. “For all the joy of finally getting my star, it was still humiliating and horrible and devastating to be seen this way. Not just because I was bigger — that was one thing — but because the girl who had control all her life no longer had that control.”
Applegate confessed that she wants to “throw up when I think of the pictures that are out there of me,” adding: “I look sad and embarrassed. Because all I can think is: everyone is staring. Once people stared at my boobs. But now I knew they were staring not only because I was disabled; they were staring because I was fat, for ever an unacceptable fate for women in Hollywood.”
“Sometimes the weight bothered me more than the disease,” she said, explaining that she was eventually put on a “clear‑liquid diet because of my stomach issues, and all of a sudden, everything just dropped off of me.”
Though she lost around 50 pounds, Applegate explained that she has “no muscles” on her body due to MS.
“It’s dangerous to be walking around with zero muscles on my body: it means my bones aren’t protected if I fall, and it scares me,” she wrote. “But there’s still that little voice in my head saying, ‘You’re really skinny. You have the legs you always wanted. Good for you.’”
“This is the sickness,” she added. “But she’s not going to win.”