Sophie Turner’s Battle Against Eating Disorder
We all struggle with something in life. No matter how big or small, every form of it is valid and they all stop us from achieving the things we want to do in life. Sophie Turner, or Sophie Belinda Jonas, struggled with something as well.
Sophie Turner made her acting debut as Sansa Stark on the HBO epic fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2019. She is internationally known for her role as Sansa but unbeknownst to the millions of viewers that the large exposure on social media resulted in her getting “sick” with an eating disorder.
Due to the negative comments she got, she struggled with her body image. Being in the public eye at such a young age led her to many struggles she continued to have even as an adult. It got severe enough that she had to get a live-in therapist that made sure she wasn’t doing anything unhealthy with her eating habits.
“I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I wish I’d never got myself involved with it in the first place,” she said in an interview with Elle UK. “I look at the comments on Instagram and think, ‘Oh, f—. Everyone thinks this about me.’ It would completely consume me.”
Sophie Turner shared that her therapist supported her through a rough time when she was being consumed by negative Instagram comments.
“One night, I was playing over and over in my mind a comment I’d seen on Instagram. I was like, ‘I’m so fat, I’m so undesirable,’ and spinning out,” Turner recalled. “She said to me, ‘You know, no one actually cares. I know you think this, but nobody else is thinking it. You’re not that important.’ ”
“That was the best thing anyone could have told me,” Turner said.
Social media is both a place of wonder where you can discover just how interesting the world and our everyday life can be but it can also destroy the way you look at yourself. It builds unrealistic expectations and makes us feel that “likes” determine our worth.
No matter how strong you may be as a person, there will always be someone out there that will do anything to bring your morale down or express their hate towards you even if you haven’t been doing anything wrong.
Sophie Turner is a woman of class, power, beauty, and kindness. She has always used her social media platforms to bring awareness to international issues that need more attention from the world such as the women’s history month, suicide prevention, and the Ukraine war. She certainly does not deserve the unpleasant comments she receives, no one deserves that. In order to help herself mentally, Turner decided to delete Instagram from her phone.
“I have noticed that social media makes me incredibly anxious and it’s something I try to distance myself from,” she said. “Having it off my phone has been so helpful. Now, if I do have to go on it, it’s for a few minutes once or twice a week, rather than hours every day. It’s made such a difference. Live real life — it’s much more fun.”
It wasn’t just social media that gave her a bad image of herself, it was also the film and television studios that did that. Stars may be out there full of smiles for us, but they have their own struggles too.
“My metabolism suddenly decided to fall to the depths of the ocean and I started to get spotty and gain weight, and all of this was happening to me on camera,” she said in 2019. That’s when Turner opted for therapy.
“Everyone needs a therapist, especially when people are constantly telling you you’re not good enough and you don’t look good enough,” she said. “I think it’s necessary to have someone to talk to, and to help you through that.”
