Lily Collins
Lily CollinsREUTERS

Lily Collins recently opened up about her real life struggle with eating disorder. According to Entertainment Tonight, she shared her experience of playing the character of Ellen, a teenager suffering from an eating disorder, in the movie To the Bone while talking about her real life struggle.

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While promoting her film To The Bone at the Sundance Film Festival 2017, the 27-year-old actress disclosed about her illness. She previously told ET, "It was an entire physical experience, emotional experience. But I was supported, and it's a really important story to tell."

During a chat session in IMDb Studio at the festival, Collins said: "This was definitely a more dramatic role for me, I suffered with eating disorders when I was a teenager as well."

"I wrote a book last year and I wrote my chapter on my experiences a week before I got Marti's script and it was like the universe putting these things in my sphere to help me face, kind of dead on, a fear that I used to have. And, a way to explain it as someone who's gone through it and to open up a topic that is considered quite taboo with young people nowadays, male, female, and to really start a conversation."

Collins admitted that she took the help of a nutritionist to lose weight for the role of an anorexic patient in the movie. She said, "It caused me to have to emotionally go there, but in a way that was the most safe, healthy way possible with a nutritionist, and really to physically go there but also emotionally and it did require a different set of emotional skills, to kind of go back in time for me, with you know, my experiences."

The actress also shared her experience of working in the film: "definitely a different type of film for me to do, very, very personal." Collins also took to Instagram over the weekend to admit that she absolutely has no shame or regrets about talking about her past.