Gemma Oaten believes that the current concept of health and fitness is “scary.”
The 41-year-old British Soap Award nominee has been hospitalized 21 times from the age of 12 to 19 due to anorexia.
However, now, Gemma believes that a lot of positive work has been done regarding eating disorders and how to manage them, in recent years.
She told the Daily Mirror newspaper: “There’s a lot around pressure to be skinny again at the moment, which is really scary.”
“I was talking about it to my friend, with the Montjaro jabs. In the ’90s and ’00s we were in our Kate Moss and Jodie Kidd era, ‘heroin chic’ was on the catwalk. It was this big narrative around how skinny and thin was beautiful,” she recalled.
“Then things progressed with body positivity and seeing larger models and people in our social streams and on television. All of a sudden, I feel like the narrative is going back to: thin is how society is meant to be, especially for women,” Gemma further mentioned.
The actress is currently the CEO of SEED, a charity that provides support to anyone who is struggling with eating disorders.
“It’s scary but we keep fighting on to try and make people understand that eating disorders are a serious mental health illness, it’s not about vanity, for many people it’s about lack of control. I always say that food is the symptom, it’s not the cause,” Gemma Oaten concluded.
