I was a teen anorexic and it’s a dark place
Fair City’s Clelia Murphy opens up about her troubled youth
SHE may look like a confident dancer each week on Dancing With The Stars, but Clelia Murphy has revealed that her younger years were plagued by so much self-doubt that she starved herself.
The former Fair City star’s struggle with anorexia began in secondary school, when the pressure of trying to be ‘perfect’ became too much. At her lowest weight, Clelia tipped the scales at a mere six-and-a-half stone.
The 43-year-old says: ‘I hadn’t been well in fifth and sixth year. I decided to starve myself. I was anorexic, nobody knows that. It wasn’t that I did it intentionally, it just happened. It was a control thing, it was always a control thing.’ Clelia spoke publicly for the first time about her eating disorder on Friday’s Late Late Show, and tonight she will elababorate further on Dublin’s Sunshine radio.
She tells presenter Andrea Hayes: ‘I was very lucky. I copped on very quickly. but I genuinely didn’t see it. It was a goal I had set myself that I wanted to get thin.
‘That’s why I am very aware of it now with young women, and I wanted to get the message across. It’s not about what you look like, it’s about how you feel, it’s in your head.
‘So, starving yourself isn’t a good trick, because all it does is starve your brain cells. So it is really important that we love ourselves.’
adds: ‘I lost my confidence, my belief in myself. I was very lucky in that I had a fantastic family around me.
‘Now, they got very upset and they got very angry about it.
‘But I didn’t understand what I was doing. I was exercising and not eating, it was the pressure of wanting to be perfect. I was rationing and exercising and the weight just fell of me.’
However, Clelia is very clear that she wants her story to deter others from falling victim to the disease.
She says: ‘I don’t want girls out there who are listening thinking, “That’s a great idea, I’ll try that”. Don’t try it. It brought me to a very dark place. I remember thinking “this is insane”.
‘I remember the moment sitting on a double-decker bus coming in from Castleknock and from the outside you would never know I was sick. But I think I went down to about six-and-a-half stone, not intentionally, I just wanted to get thin. I wasn’t thinking fit or healthy, I remember looking into the Liffey and thinking I am exactly the weight I want to be and I am miserable.’
Clelia also found herself pregnant at 21 after joining Fair City as sassy redhead Niamh Cassidy.
But, in her own inimitable way, she says giving birth to her beautiShe ful daughter Clara Belle was the best unplanned event of her life.
‘I was a single mother at 21. Myself and her dad had been going out for about four years before it happened but it didn’t work out, so I found myself at home as a single mum,’ Clelia admits.
‘I took ten months out when I had Clara Belle, and I was very lucky she was reared by a village. I remember being at home in Castleknock and the kitchen phone rang and it was a journalist.
‘My grandparents didn’t know I was pregnant. The minute I knew I was pregnant I knew it was the best thing that was ever going to happen to me.
‘It sounds scary, and it was scary, to be pregnant at 21.
‘The journalist got the story and I had just told my grandmother and granddad. It did hit the papers and headlines were like “I’m not revealing the name of the father”. I knew then that wasn’t the life I wanted.’
‘Starving yourself isn’t a good trick’
‘I didn’t understand what I was doing’