Exclusive| For six years I had no name for what I was going through: Sana Saeed on battling bulimia
Here's the latest update from the Bollywood world:
Star Sana Saeed moved from Mumbai to Los Angeles, US permanently in 2021, after previously visiting for short stints and a movie workshop at the New York Movie Academy in 2016. Still remembered as the young Anjali from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) and later for Student of the Year (2012), Sana now runs her own production company in the US with husband Csaba Wagner.
Adding to this, Sana Saeed Speaking about starting life from scratch in the US the star says, “I first came to Los Angeles to study acting and filmmaking in 2016. When I went home, I couldn’t name it yet, but I knew I had to return. I was being called to it. I’d lived my whole life in India up to that point and I think my soul just wanted a new adventure. Leaving my friends and family was harder than I expected. I knew the move would affect my work and I’d made peace with that going in. Starting over somewhere nobody knows your history is humbling, but it also cleared space for me to decide who I actually wanted to be.”
Meanwhile, The star says that having her husband by her side made the life altering decision more comforting. She says, “My husband had already been living here for a while by the time I made the move. Our production company, Beyond Magic Studios, is new and it’s something we’ve built together and we’re genuinely excited about it. We’ve come to believe, in our own ways, that going after what you want and taking risks, is the only way we want to live. I’m married to my best friend and now I get to work with him on the very thing I’ve loved my whole life. Things really do have a way of working out.”
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As per the latest buzz, Sana also of late took to social media to open up about battling Bulimia (an eating disorder). She says growing up, she never heard the words bulimia or eating disorder. She says, “What it looked like to me was a bad habit I’d developed, something I had to figure out alone. I carried so much shame around it, thinking I was the only one dealing with this. For six years I had no name for what I was going through. I was desperate to get better and find a healthy way to eat and eventually I came across a book on recovery that gave me the language for what I was actually dealing with. That’s when the real healing began, and it took four years to recover completely.” She says the recovery could have started much earlier if she was aware what she was going through. “Now that I’m healed, it matters to me deeply that if my story helps even one person feel less alone in theirs, that’s worth more than the discomfort of being vulnerable in public,” says Sana.
In further updates, She says the pressure of losing weight isn’t unique to the entertainment industry. “I remember being in college and noticing all my friends around me dieting, trying to lose weight, talking about their changing bodies. That was the era of size zero when skinny was in, when there were ten different diets available on Google and everyone I knew was running on a treadmill. Becoming aware of your changing body as a young woman is completely natural, but health, nutrition, and building strength for the long run weren’t topics I grew up around. My world complimented weight loss and nothing else, not how you felt, not whether you’d gone hungry all day to look a certain way. I think the industry just amplifies something a lot of us already carry. Being on camera, being commented on, having your appearance be part of the job description. “ She points out that it can turn a normal relationship with your body into a much more complicated one if you’re not careful. “I don’t look back at any one moment or person with blame. I look back at a young woman who didn’t yet have the tools to separate how she looked from who she was, in an environment that made that separation harder than it needed to be. It was the slow realisation that I was spending all my energy managing something instead of living my life,” says Sana. The real turning point came when her reason for healing got bigger and she couldn't imagine her future, living with the disorder. She recalls, "I remember telling myself that if I got married, I’d never actually enjoy a date with my husband if I was busy worrying about food. That if I ever had children, I never wanted to pass this on. If any of that was going to be my future, I had to heal first.”
Source: Hindustan Times