Actor Sana Saeed recently opened up about her battle with bulimia, an eating disorder (ED) in which a person repeatedly eats too much and then forces themselves to vomit. She shared her journey on Instagram to help anyone suffering silently “feel less alone in their story”, she tells us, adding that growing up , she had never heard the terms ED or bulimia.

The actor, who made her debut as a child actor with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), says, “I carried so much shame, thinking I was the only one dealing with this,” adding, “For six years, I had no name for what I was going through. Eventually I came across a book that gave me the language for it. That’s when the healing began, and it took four years to recover.”

The pressure of losing weight, she says, began back in college: “That was the era of size zero, when skinny was in. My world complimented weight loss and nothing else, not how you felt, not whether you’d gone hungry all day.”

This also translated when she made her way back to the screen in Student Of The Year (2012). “Being on camera, being commented on, having your appearance be part of the job description... It can turn a normal relationship with your body into a much more complicated one if you’re not careful.”

But the turning point for her came when the reason for healing got bigger than herself. “I remember telling myself that if I got married, I’d never actually enjoy a date with my husband if I was busy worrying about food. If I had children, I never wanted to pass this on. I had to heal.”

Now, she’s permanently settled in Los Angeles, running her own production house with husband Csaba Wagner. “Starting over somewhere nobody knows your history is humbling, but it also cleared space for me to decide who I actually wanted to be,” she says.