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Where do you turn in a crisis when everyone you know is part of the same cult?
As a teenager, Jinger Duggar had an eating disorder.
It took seeing someone wasting away before she pursued help for herself.
Michelle’s reaction may be surprising to some.
Eating disorders can happen to anyone, but a teen fundamentalist on reality TV is at higher risk
On this week’s episode of the Call Your Sister podcast, Jinger opened up about her eating disorder struggles as a teen — and how her mother responded.
“I had so much stress in my body that I almost physically was feeling sick,” she recalled to Joy on the October 14 episode.
“There was so much that I was processing through and I was really stressed,” Jinger explained.
Disordered eating can take many forms. For her, it was food avoidance — skipping meals to feel more in control of her body and her life.
“I would try to sleep in as late as I could, so I would not have to eat breakfast,” Jinger recalled, “and I’d try to make it through lunch and then try to not eat lunch.”
Many people who skip meals do so by being in different environments, so that people at school believe that they are eating at home, and people at home believe that they are eating at school.
Jinger is a homeschooling victim, so this was not an option for her. But, she said, the Duggars ate dinner together more often than other meals — so it was easier to go unnoticed.
Ultimately, she knew that she needed help when, on a group trip, she saw someone struggling with bulimia.
“She was literally sickly and she had so many health issues and she looked terrible because her body was withering away,” Jinger described. “She was in a terrible place.”
She recalled: “Ultimately I was looking at her and I’m like, ‘Just stop doing that,’ as I’m over here doing the same thing in a different way.”
Michelle to the rescue?
Realizing that she needed help, Jinger turned to essentially the only resource that she had — her mother, Michelle.
Astonishingly, Michele responded “with such grace and kindness,” Jinger described, sharing her own history with an eating disorder.
“She said, ‘But good thing is you’re talking, you’re going to be fine,’” she recalled.
Jinger shared: “I was so reassured knowing that because I said that, she was not like, ‘Oh my goodness, here’s three cheeseburgers, eat them all.’” (Three is not generally a lot of cheeseburgers, but can feel scary or even immoral to someone with disordered eating habits.)
“She was like, ‘No, it’s OK. You can eat healthy food and be healthy,’” she went on. “But she also said, ‘You don’t need to avoid food because that’s gonna harm your body later.’”
Jinger went on to detail how Michelle had helped her to keep a log of what she ate, and how recovery took years.
Many might understandably express surprise that the infamous cultist seemed to respond in a healthy and affirming manner.
But, sometimes, the key with these types is for them to personally relate to someone’s problem. That can, for some, be the only thing stopping them from pushing whatever the cult prescribes and leaving it at that.
Disordered eating is common, but not often discussed, within the extreme fringes of American conservative Christianity, even outside of fundamentalist spaces. Cultists, especially women, have few to no healthy resources and live in a world where their appearances are both seen as the pathway to wrongdoing and a sign of virtue.
We’re glad that Jinger was able to recover and share her story.
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