Ginger Zee opened up about her past battle with anorexia during an emotional night on Dancing With the Stars on Monday, May 16. The Good Morning America meteorologist revealed that the eating disorder was triggered following her parents’ divorce when she was 10 years old.
“I think [the split] affected my childhood a lot,” Zee, 35, explained in a pre-taped package before taking center stage with her pro partner, Val Chmerkovskiy.
“We were moving. I had to make the new friends. I had to do everything. I had to control something so I was like, ‘I know what I can do. I’ll just not eat,'” she recalled. “I don’t think I even knew how bad it was at that time.”
Zee struggled with anorexia until she was 14. Her mom, Dawn E. Zuidgeest-Craft, who was also featured on the show, said that only she and Ginger’s close friends knew about the private matter at the time.
“I’m so angry that’s the way that I decided to cope,” Zee added. “It’s going to be with me my entire life. I’m always going to have body-shaming issues. But I think I’ve now grown into enough of a woman and mature person that I realize life is a lot bigger than that.”
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