The new Lifetime television network series “Starving Secrets with Tracey Gold’ premiered on Dec 2. Tracy Gold starred on the 80’s sitcom Growing Pains, and struggled publicly with an eating disorder in her late teens and early twenties. She recovered, and is now an activist who is using her experience to help save others lives as well. Starving Secrets follows the daily lives of individuals who are suffering from dangerous eating disorders, Tracy reaches out to help them and offer treatment.
So far, Starving Secrets has featured women with varying degrees of anorexia and bulimia. And like snowflakes, no two people’s eating disorders are alike. They may binge and purge, restrict, overexercise, or take diet pills and laxitives, or all of the above. They all have unique fears, rules and methods to their eating disorders. Laced in with that is sometimes extreme self esteem issues, family problems, or chemical dependancy. All of these varying factors makes each of their stories unique.
Starving Secrets does a good job in showing what eating disorders are really like, that they are serious, chronic, and that they interfere with every aspect of life. It is not just someone wanting to be thinner, it is much deeper. Eating disorders truly are a mental illness, and cause more physical damage than most people realize. Tracey Gold is literally helping to save these women’s lives, as well as informing the masses about the realities of eating disorders.
Starving Secrets with Tracey Gold airs on Friday nights at 11pm on Lifetime. Click here for episodes.