Sharna Burgess is opening up about her fraught relationship with food.
“I struggled with binging and restricting mostly,” the “Dancing With the Stars” alum admitted during a candid Instagram “Ask Me Anything” on Sunday, after a fan asked, “Have you ever struggled with eating disorders?”
Burgess, 40, added that she “had a super complicated relationship with food” as a teen and into her 20s, but that habits “changed” once she hit her 30s.
The Australian-born performer previously spoke about the added pressures she’s faced with her weight as a professional dancer.
“I had a real struggle with my body because of dance,” she told Australia’s Good Health & Wellbeing magazine in a 2021 interview.
“I remember being 15 and put on the scale every two days by my teachers and we were told whether we needed to lose weight or not. Every week I was told that I needed to lose more weight — and I certainly wasn’t overweight.”
Burgess said that dance “instilled a negative body image,” which carried on to the way she ate.
“It also started a negative pattern of eating whereby I’d binge one day, and then starve the next. I struggled with that throughout the years,” she explained. “Even in my 20s, I’d look in the mirror and see the 15-year-old that was told every week she needed to lose more weight.”
However, things began to change when she joined the cast of “DWTS” in 2011.
“It was seeing just how much the celebrities on the show transformed and ended up loving their bodies through being able to move and dance that really shook my perspective,” she explained. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve been doing this my whole life.’
“I started to see something else in the mirror, I started to see a body that had gotten me through some incredibly difficult times, that had created some beautiful moments, that had won championships, that had landed me a life I never ever thought possible.”
However, that’s not to say the dancing pro has ruled out returning to the long-running show in the future.
“It’s never a no,” she said during her Instagram Q&A on Sunday. “I was supposed to do something with them last season, but I was already working on a play in NYC and couldn’t commit. I love [the cast and crew], the show and am always going to want to be there.”
