Hilaria Baldwin, the 42-year-old yoga instructor and reality television personality, told a radio audience she spent 20 years battling anorexia, bulimia, overeating, and undereating, a struggle she says began when she started dieting at age five.
Baldwin laid out the full scope of her history in an exclusive Tuesday morning interview on SiriusXM's Page Six Radio, sitting down with co-hosts Danny Murphy and Evan Real. She did not soften the details. The fear of food, she said, became so consuming that she was "afraid of how many calories might be in toothpaste."
The interview marks Baldwin's most detailed public account of the disorders that she says dominated her life from early childhood through adulthood. She first addressed the subject in her 2016 memoir, "The Living Clearly Method," and expanded on it in a 2018 Instagram post. But the radio conversation went further, cataloguing the full range of behaviors and the toll they took on her daily life.
Baldwin told Murphy and Real she cycled through multiple disorders over the years, describing the experience in blunt terms:
"I did all of it. I did anorexia, I did bulimia, I did overeating, I did undereating."
She said the disorders warped her self-image completely. Looking back at old photographs, she said, she can see the distortion for what it was.
"I look back and I looked fine. But I thought I was a whale [back then]. I just thought there was something broken inside of me."
The isolation was as damaging as the physical toll, Baldwin told Page Six Radio. She described a life constricted by anxiety around meals and social settings.
"I can't have good relationships, I can't have good friendships, I can't eat out to dinner with people. It's just so, so, so stressful."
That misery, she said, eventually became the catalyst for change. She recalled reaching a breaking point: "I don't want to live this way; I'm miserable."
Baldwin said she completed much of the hard work of overcoming her eating disorder before she began having children with husband Alec Baldwin. The couple now shares seven kids. She credited her ADHD, in part, with giving her the capacity to focus intensely on healing, though she offered no further clinical detail about the diagnosis or when she received it.
Motherhood, she said, gave her a reason to stay the course. She did not want her children to inherit the same relationship with food that had consumed two decades of her life.
Her approach with her kids centers on conversation rather than restriction. Baldwin described asking her children how food makes them feel and framing meals around strength and health rather than weight or appearance.
"What I try to do with [my kids] is empower them, talk about strength, talk about, 'How does the food make you feel?'"
She also described sharing ice cream with her youngest daughter, a small moment she presented as evidence that food no longer controls her.
Baldwin's willingness to discuss eating disorders publicly is not new, but the level of detail has grown over time. Her 2016 memoir first broached the subject. Two years later, she posted on Instagram about the shift in her thinking that helped her move past the obsession with weight.
"I have found that being healthy is about not focusing on weight and rather on how I feel, how strong I am, and how healthy I am. Weight and how you look are side effects. Not the main focus. When I started focusing on health, my obsession with weight went away. They should not be confused."
The Baldwin family has remained in the public eye for years, and not always on their own terms. Alec Baldwin faced intense scrutiny after the fatal 2021 shooting on the set of the film "Rust." The Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office issued a search warrant for his cellphone after he refused to hand it over voluntarily, and investigators found messages on the phone dating back to July 2021, including Baldwin reportedly requesting a larger gun for the film. Hilaria Baldwin was with her husband when Hamptons police pulled the couple over during that investigation.
Hilaria Baldwin now stars in Fox's unscripted series "Nation's Dumbest," which airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET. She is also a "Dancing With the Stars" alum and appeared in the reality series "The Baldwins."
The most striking detail in Baldwin's account is the age at which it all started. She said she began dieting at five. No child that young decides on her own that food is the enemy. Baldwin did not elaborate on the circumstances, and the interview left that question unanswered.
She did not specify whether she considers herself fully recovered or still managing the disorder day to day. The distinction matters, and she left it open.
Eating disorders thrive on secrecy and shame. Whatever else one thinks of the Baldwin family's public profile, putting a specific, unflinching account on the record, toothpaste calories and all, is the opposite of hiding. That part, at least, is hard to argue with.
