Madison De La Garza made a name for herself with a starring role on the series “Desperate Housewives” when she was just 6 years old.
However, De La Garza, now 21, struggled with body image issues behind the scenes and even battled an eating disorder.
She recently revealed that began to starve herself when she was just 7 — due to the online bullying she faced.
“The reactions that I got to my character on ‘Desperate Housewives’ were … I mean, it was just shocking,” De La Garza told Elizabeth Vargas on her “Heart of the Matter” podcast.
The actress — who is also the half-sister of Demi Lovato — played Juanita Solis, the daughter of Eva Longoria’s character, Gabrielle, from 2008 until 2012.
De La Garza began using a computer when she was just a kid — despite not being allowed to by her parents — and spent a “crazy amount of time reading through” online comments.
She claimed that social media led to “affecting my mental health and ultimately played into me developing an eating disorder at a very young age.”
Besides depriving herself of food, she also endured a binge eating disorder.
She recalled that people threw hateful words and phrases her way regarding her looks, including “ugly fat cow” and even saying, “I hope you get cancer and die because you’re so fat” — all when she was still under age 10.
“Just horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible things. And this is when I was 6, 7, 8 years old,” De La Garza said.
Because she didn’t tell her family about the digital abuse, she doesn’t “blame” them for not helping her with her eating disorder.
“It was literally impossible to stop me from seeing those things. And I was also very good at hiding and throwing away meals, then saying that I ate them,” she noted. “A lot of this happened while I was at school, so there was no way for my parents to know that I was restricting.”
However, she recollected that while people working on the set of the hit ABC dramedy didn’t tell her about the negativity they also witnessed, they did try to increase her self-esteem.
The adults on the show would “go out of their way to tell me that I was beautiful and tell me that I looked really pretty.”
She described how the wardrobe department tried to make her feel as “comfortable” as possible, and she felt that she was able to “speak up” about how she felt in her costumes.
While De La Garza was grateful and “really appreciated” people’s efforts to support her, she also saw that her body image problems became a plot thread in the show.
There was an episode in the show’s fifth season in which De La Garza’s Juanita wanted to wear makeup because school bullies told her she was ugly and wasn’t pretty enough to be Gabrielle’s (Longoria) daughter.
“The whole joke of my character was that Eva was this thin, beautiful model, and her daughter turned out to be quite the opposite. And so I think she was very aware that this was going to affect me,” she explained.
The Dallas native applauded Longoria, 48, for going “out of her way to make me feel like I was pretty and like I was special” — despite De La Garza never explicitly telling the “Searching for Mexico” host about the online torment.
De La Garza is now two years into her recovery. “Things are going really, really well, which is great to be able to say that. But I don’t think it’s something that will ever be completely gone or it will ever be completely fixed,” she said.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, contact the National Eating Disorders Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237.
