Lucy Hale opens up about alcohol abuse and eating disorder

Actress Lucy Hale recently opened up about her struggles with alcohol addiction and an eating disorder. During an interview on The Diary of a CEO podcast, the 33-year-old shared that she had been privately dealing with these issues for years. Hale said that she had a problem with alcohol from her first experience drinking, which was when she was only 14 years old, up until a year ago. She described herself as a "textbook binge drinker" and said that she would black out every time she drank. She also admitted that she had never been a normal, moderate drinker and that her drinking had always been a problem. The actress recalled that she would pick up her first drink and like the feeling, then have another, and then another. Before she knew it, she had lost count and would not remember anything from the rest of the night. Hale had hard conversations with her friends, family, and even her manager, who she said "saved my life at times" during the height of her alcohol abuse. While she did not need an intervention to acknowledge what was happening, she admitted that she had never thought of herself as normal. She had moments where she did not want to change and thought that she could not give up drinking. She said, "Who would I be if I can’t have fun and let loose and drink?" Hale had a similar relationship with her eating disorder, which she said she developed in her early teens when she was homeschooled and had to start logging her exercise hours for physical education. She saw her body change and started restricting her eating, and it slowly grew and grew into something she could not enjoy life with. She went to a therapist a handful of times and was told she was anorexic. She first shared her experience with an eating disorder in 2012 and said that a previous boyfriend helped her to mend her relationship with food. Both the body image and substance abuse issues, she concluded, stemmed from a lack of self-worth that "manifested" in these ways. Hale said that she thought if she could just be a certain weight or size, then she would be enough. Eventually, Hale realized that she had to address the root of her issues to make a real change in her life. She had tried to change for boyfriends, her mother, her career, and for vain reasons, but nothing worked. She knew that she deserved more from life and had to try a different way. Hale announced her sobriety publicly for the first time on February 14, acknowledging that her one year of sobriety was an act of self-love. In the podcast, she shared that the journey has been far from easy, and she had to and wanted to get sober because she deserved more out of life and had to commit to it.