Shah Rukh Khan’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai co-star Sana Saeed recently opened up about one of the most challenging aspects of her life. Sana, who also starred alongside Alia Bhatt in Student of the Year, spoke about battling the eating disorder bulimia from a young age.
‘Constantly want to hide and eat’
Sana shared a video on Instagram, speaking about her struggle with food-related anxiety and how it impacted her everyday life. She shared that reading the book The Bulimia Help Method helped her deal with the disorder. She said in the clip, “I cannot constantly want to hide and eat or be worried that she [someone] will enter my room and think that I am overeating. I remember when I started reading the book, I was like… because you are so scared, you finally know what the problem is and you don’t want to face it. You have lived with it for so many years; you think something is absolutely wrong with you.”
‘Didn’t know I had an eating disorder for years’
Sana admitted that accepting that she had an eating disorder was the hardest part for her. “I remember telling myself, ‘Okay, it’s some sort of an eating disorder. But it’s not this,’ because it was so difficult for me to admit to myself that I had bulimia. I never heard about it growing up. I wish I’d heard about it, so I would have gone straight to the problem,” Sana added.
Sana shared in the caption that she has now fully recovered. She wrote, “I didn’t know I had an eating disorder for years. Not because I wasn’t suffering, but because I had never heard the words. Growing up, nobody talked about it. There was no language for what I was going through, so I carried it silently and alone for a long time. When I finally read about bulimia, I understood for the first time what was happening to me. And even then, the shame of admitting it, even just to myself, took years to move through.”
‘Fully recovered now’
She concluded, “I am fully recovered and I have never felt more at home in my body or my life. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or look for eating disorder support in your region. You deserve real help from someone qualified to give it.”
For the unversed, bulimia nervosa is a serious eating disorder characterised by repeated cycles of binge eating followed by compensatory behaviours, such as self-induced vomiting, to prevent weight gain.