Whitney Cummings Opens Up About Her Eating Disorder: 'I Became Irrationally Terrified of Fat'

Whitney Cummings’ life is now an open book.

The comedian and co-creator of 2 Broke Girls has written her first memoir, I’m Fine… And Other Lies, detailing the events in her life — including battling an eating disorder — that brought her to the success she enjoys today.

“I feel like I finally accumulated enough embarrassments, disasters and wisdom to put a book together that can compete with reading the Internet,” she said earlier this year. “And you’re welcome, readers, now you can just read this book instead of f—ing up like I did.”

Watching both her mother and stepmother diet when she was a child, Cummings, 35, insists that from age 14 to 18, she ate a diet consisting of primarily rice cakes, apples and nonfat yogurt. “I became irrationally terrified of fat,” she writes.

Despite becoming “alarmingly thin … I looked like the shadow of Jared Leto” and her hair falling out, Cummings could not shake her obsession with being skinny and admits her own perception of her body was very skewed. “It was as if I were looking in a funhouse mirror that makes your hips comically large,” she writes. “I literally could not see myself how others did.”

Cummings’ eating disorder and body dysmorphia continued after she moved to L.A. when she was 19 and she began binge-eating, even in her sleep. Waking up in the mornings, the comedian would find herself covered with wrappers of food she had eaten in the middle of the night. “Sometimes I was even sticky from whatever weird sauce I blindly poured down my throat.”

The comedian finally turned a corner with the support of her friends and realized how much happier and healthier she could be with proper nutrition. “And even crazier… my hairbrush no longer looked like Chewbacca.”

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Cummings insists she now knows her eating disorder stemmed from a lack of self-confidence, which at first came as a shock. And while she still struggles with food at times, the comedian is hopeful that sharing her journey with humor might help others who are struggling as well.

“The other good news about my overcoming an eating disorder and putting some weight on is that it makes you look about ten years younger,” she writes. “People keep asking me if I’ve gotten a facelift and I’m like, ‘Nope, just got that extra side of guac.’ “

I’m Fine… And Other Lies is on sale now.