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Teresa Palmer reveals secret battle with orthorexia

Teresa Palmer fought a three-year battle against orthorexia.

The 34-year-old actress has admitted to suffering from the eating disorder – which centres around an obsession with health eating – between 2009 and 2012, revealing she had "a very unhealthy relationship with food" at the time.

Teresa – who diagnosed herself with the disorder after reflecting on her own eating habits – shared: "I had orthorexia. Not many people have heard of it, but it is an eating disorder.

"I was incredibly clean with my eating, so I didn’t have anorexia or bulimia, but I had something different, which is when you become so obsessed with the amount of calories you’re putting into your body, everything had to be of the highest quality.

"I wouldn’t eat anything stripped of its nutritional value."

Teresa’s obsession with healthy food stemmed from an incident in 2008, when an agent told her she needed to slim down.

She recalled on the ‘Mamamia Me Before You’ podcast: "She said, ‘Do you know what? You should start working out, because that’s a part of your job. You need to make sure that you look really good.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I thought I did look good.’

"The scary thing is that I’ve always been such a small person. I look back on the photos that she’s talking about and I was just so little still. Yes, I wasn’t perfectly sculpted, but that really set off this huge whirlwind of unhealthy obsession surrounding food."

However, becoming a mother proved to be a turning point for Teresa.

The ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ star – who has Bodhi, six, Forest, three, and Poet Lake, 15 months, with husband Mark Webber – explained: "My body just blossomed and I had this big belly and I could feel life within me, and it was just incredible seeing what my body could do.

"I was getting stretch marks on my boobs and cellulite all over my bum and the backs of my thighs."

Teresa found her pregnancy to be a liberating experience.

She said: "I was finally liberated from these judgements that I had surrounding my body, which I realised had existed since I was … a teenager.

"Since being a mum, I’ve embraced it all. The lumps and the bumps and the stretch marks … it’s a map of my journey of bringing my babies into the world."