This post contains discussion of eating disorders and body image issues.
Julie explained why she thinks she struggled as a teenager. “I interpreted being messy or making mistakes or having an ass or like fat coming out of the top of your jeans [as] a symbol that you couldn’t contain yourself,” she said.
“That you were too much, and that to be good meant staying inside the lines — literally and figuratively,” Julie continued. “Keeping it tight. And that’s my attitude: tight.”
“And by the way, that is not fun. It’s not a fun way to live.”
Julie also remembers “struggling” and “not liking that feeling of changing” when it came to puberty. “We didn’t talk about anything, and it just sort of felt like…dirty,” she remembered.
“And I realized, when you’re really starving, you don’t have any feelings. It’s kind of amazing. The body goes, ‘We don’t have time for that.’ So I think it was a coping mechanism.”
Julie is the parent to three children, including her 13-year-old twins John and Gustav — and during the interview with Tamron, she remembered being body-shamed after giving birth to them.
“I had my twins in 2009, and I was in Hawaii shooting Modern Family…less than a year later,” she recalled. “I was working and breastfeeding, and I jumped in the ocean with my husband at the time wearing a bikini — no one was around — and by the time we got up to the room, there had been paparazzi like in the rocks hidden away, and it was the nastiest.”
“Like, ‘What is wrong with her? This is disgusting.’ People circling my belly and my boobs and [saying], ‘This is nasty.'”
“I felt like I had done something wrong. Like somebody took a picture of you in your most private moment. And [the paparazzi] had no idea my body just did something fucking amazing.”
