 Everyone listening has some kind of eating disorder. When you can't stop yourself from like going back to the- If they're real fans. If you're a real American fan. Where's my single right there? If you're a real fan of eating disorder. I mean, who doesn't? If you don't have an eating disorder, I just- If you ain't put Windex on them cookies. You've been aware of envy as like a thing. Oh, so long. And have you done anything about it? Starved myself. I got an eating disorder. I got, you know, I- I haven't shown anything positive. Oh, oh, I thought you meant like, what did you do to like- I've gotten, you know, Botox and filler and micro- You know what? I want to apologize for one time I told you you look too skinny and you got mad at me. This is seven years ago. Oh, I probably was like secretly so happy. No, that's funny. You like got legit pissed at me in Montreal. Because I thought you were going to try to bar my jeans. Feel bad. You weren't that skinny. Like, sweetie, sweetie. You know, in Montreal, I always get so- Like, I would drop weight before Montreal because I would be so nervous. And then nerves make you not eat. And then as you pass anorexic, if I might naturally lose my appetite, I'm like, let's ride this out. So what have you done that's positive? You know, Louise Hay, I'm sure you've tried that first off. Who is that? She's, you know, no, she did like positive affirmations. And it really works, but she just talks about like- I don't listen positive affirmations. I do get, I do have an app that sends me them every 70 minutes to my phone. But I don't listen to them. I read them every 70 minutes on my phone. I'm not a maniac. I've been on the affirmations for like a month and I'm already ignoring them. I listened to them this morning because I was having a rough morning and it was just like, you just are supposed to say to yourself, 800 times a day, I'm accepting of myself. I'm accepting of myself. And I've said it probably a thousand times today in the Uber and everything. And that's worked for me. Affirmations healed my back pain one time. What the Uber driver did. I was muttering it as he played Mariachi music really loud. So it's not racist. He was what? He loved Mariachi music. Yeah, a lot more than just Latino people can like Mariachi music. You're being racist. Also Mariachi, there you go. He was taking Mariachi lessons. There's a lot of them in LA. You've never been here. You wouldn't know. Mariachi also is based on polka music. Looked it up because I noticed a similarity. People think that's autistic. I call it being interesting. No, autistic is interesting. Are you of the sort of, you can't change people and you kind of, they're just gonna run their course and? I mean, I do, I feel like I, the one thing, and this is I only do it for myself. So I don't feel like I, because I appreciated when people reached out to me and say, hey, Maria, like, you know, I had an eating disorder. So at one point, you know, several parts of my life people said, hey, Maria, you're getting too thin. And I'm like, fuck you. I am Karen Carpenter. Did you, well, yeah, it's funny. The women I know have had eating disorders and like the pride you started taking. Oh God, yeah. Nikki Glazer was saying, she would get lightheaded and be like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just, everything forms this perverse value system. Yeah, yeah, no. And yeah, you're just jealous. And yeah, all right, weirdo. But that's one of those things where I said something to Nikki one time and she got pissed at me. Yeah, of course she did. Yeah, and retrospectively, I'm just grateful that the person said it. Part of developing the eating disorder was to kind of knock myself out. So I'd stopped thinking these thoughts, like just to be like, oh my God, I'm gonna have 17 bowls of ice cream so that I don't have to think about this stuff anymore. You feel so sick that you're like, all right, well, this is just, this is my priority now. Yeah, yeah, I'll pass out or, yeah, it keeps you busy eating disorders, keeps you off the pipe. Well, the way you, the way you were like, the way I developed my eating disorder, like it was a band. Right, right. You get into your eating disorder. What you do, you get yourself, man, all I had was a bunch of pickles. I had a bunch of pickles, I poured some sugar in it. My process takes breath. I gotta get to band practice in the bathroom. Here's another withering thing that you've said to me that you noticed that I couldn't believe you noticed. One night on stage, you go, hey, I see you grabbing your love handles. I didn't even know I was doing it. Yeah, well, that was helpful. That told me a lot about you that, that like sort of like broke down a great wall between us. But I'm interested in your, cause I don't, like you're open, you have a eating disorder, sort of, that you, that's ongoing. Have you gone to 12 step program? I have tried that, but it's, you know, I'm not, you can't look like me and go to an eating disorder recovery thing. Like it's just like, it's like smoking weed and going to NA or something. No, it's just like, you know, most of the people in there have overeating issues. And you know, I have, but I am mildly anorexic. Meaning you will under eat. No, meaning that I have like bizarre food issues around gaining weight. You're against it? Totally. You have a scale? I do, but like I'm okay with this stuff now. Like I have been okay. I had to do a lot of work on it, but it is like if I get above a certain level of discomfort physically, like I really become totally diminished. And like I feel like zero self-worth, zero confidence. If you're over one eighty- 85-ish, 86-ish, you know, like I think, I mean, I've gotten heavy, but like I can't handle it. And I've spent a lot of time as I get older, just being like, dude, just enjoy yourself. You know, what do you care if you're chubby or whatever? And I try to sit in that for a minute and I just can't do it. And now I'm vegan, like, you know, for the last few months, which I don't know if it's affecting my weight, but I feel better about what I'm eating. But that food stuff is so deep and it's so dug into me. From your mom, right? Yeah, yeah. She had an eating disorder? She still, you know, she just, that was her life was, you know, maintaining a weight of like 119 or 116. So I was brought up, you know, as a chunky kid, as they say, you know, husky pants. And by this mother who was terrified, like I used to do a joke, that joke about, like I think that for the first nine years of my life, my mother just saw me as her fat. And that if she just stopped eating, maybe I... I hope you didn't write it ahead of time. I hope you just thought of it on stage. I think I must have. I hope to God. Of course they did. But you didn't just, you didn't actually sit down. That structured like a joke, but it's not a laugher. You know, like it's just a sad piece of information. It gets a jarring laugh. It doesn't quite make sense. That's funny. I mean, that could get a laugh. Yeah, but like it still, it plagues me still. Like I think about food constantly and about what to eat, how to eat, what I shouldn't eat, how much shame I have. It's deeper than drugs. And it affects my... Oh, that's interesting. Well, I guess it's cause you can't avoid it. It's the same kind of thing. I think it all sprouts from that well that my mother felt so insecure and weird that she made her entire life about managing her weight. And she got down to below a hundred at different times. She was definitely clinically fucked up with it when I was growing up. And it affected everything. The two of them, the selfishness involved in both my parents, but that eating disorder really got me. Like I remember I went away to college my freshman year and I got as skinny as ever. I was down in the 160s and I looked terrible. But I just wanted my mom to be proud. Was she? Nah, not really. She said I looked weird. There was no winning. You know what I mean? It was always a little stick. Yeah. But I think that's where I got the sense of humor too. It was always a little stick. I would think you think of yourself as a combination of your parents. Yeah. Like this one. For sure. Like just ascribe. Don't you? Yes, but I still try to think like, well, not that. Well, no, I think that you can have a little control over that. I do think that you can make choices in your life. And also there's something proactive about isolating the bad things that you got from them and trying to sort of cognitively deal with those and embrace the things, find the things that you got from them that are good. I think that's a great recovery thing. Not necessarily recovery in the terms of 12 steps or anything, but in terms of psychological recovery to accept the parts of your parents that kind of made you who you are in a good way. And then deal with the other ones in a different way. Like, I can make different choices than to honor that monster. Yeah, right. But it's also, it's kind of enjoyable to indulge it every once in a while. Yeah, just gotta keep it on a leash. Right, watching you, it's like, oh, Mark's indulging himself tonight. Like it's like, oh, Mark's being like petty Mark. Food. Yeah, like. Cigars, nastiness. Pervy looks. Yeah, your bachelor party is like, we're just gonna be nasty. We're just gonna say nasty, cutting shit about people. We don't need strippers. Yeah, I'm not a big stripper guy, I never have been. We'll just bring a pile of photos and we're just gonna shit on people. Shit on people, yeah. I had an eating disorder from the age of like 11. It was all coming out in different ways, but I just thought it was all my fault. I thought I was broken. I had no idea that I was in an extremely, cause as a kid, you just know what you know. You have no idea. I didn't know if I was rich or poor, but like you just don't know. You have nothing to compare it to, especially if you are isolated from other people. And so that was, you know, my experience. And so you grow up like that. Like the first seven years of your brain developing are so vital. And so I grew up in like nothing but abject terror with like little injections of love here and there. Mostly, you know, I think like stability from my brother, but then he left when I was six years old and moved to another country cause he was so traumatized in England. So I was left on my own with a lot of very, very, very troubled adults who now as an old person, I can look back on at the age that they were and go, fuck. It just shouldn't have been around a child. I have immense empathy now for like how mentally ill they were. But I was just, I was just fucking emotional, Jumanji, like from the minute I could understand. And so that's why I think- Jumanji, that's a Pakistani? It's an Indian restaurant around the corner. Guys, I do racism professionally. I do structured racism. I've been doing it for about 20 years. Yeah. Severe body dysmorphia. And face dysmorphia. Yeah. And anorexia. Yeah. I don't have those things now, but I just thought, given how much of my time publicly is spent talking about diet culture and the eagles of it, it'd be a bit weird or disingenuous if I didn't just put it on my list. But I also said this might be boring and we don't have to talk about it. No, no, no. I mean, I'm more interested in how it stopped. How did it end? EMDR, EMDR, and again, having a boyfriend that I wanted to live for. I'm still get suicidal ID now and then with James, but it's harder to follow through. But I'm saying the dysmorphia, like my body is gross or my face is gray. The dysmorphia in the face hasn't gone. I don't think that's ever going to go. I don't know if that can go. I think there's actually something like neurologically wired to mean that I can't see what I look like in the mirror. And so weirdly a photograph, I can believe, but in the mirror, I see something completely morphed. And so I don't really look in mirrors very often. And when I have to do my makeup, I do it on a compact that's literally this big, even for like the golden globes, like this big, so that I can just look at one feature at a time rather than have to like terrorize myself in my face. Having been to a hairdresser, you know, people make fun of how long I've had this hair. People make fun of how long I've had this haircut since I was two, which is 35 years. And it's because I can't bear to go to a hairdresser because I don't want to sit in front of a mirror. Yeah, so I just, you know, trust whatever's being done if someone does blow dry it, but I cut my own hair, cut my own terrible fringe because I just can't bear it. So it is fine. It's fine. It's a shitty thing to feel, but it also is why I spent such a long time focusing on my brain and my sense of humor and my personality and making myself less and less of an intolerable person, which I'm still working on, is because I knew I didn't have that to rely on. And then the most confusing thing in the world is to go from being picked on for the way that I looked my whole life to now being told that I have this like pretty privilege and that I am considered an attractive person and I am put on the cover of Vogue or whatever. My brain doesn't go, huh, well then I must be pretty gorgeous. My brain just goes, not everyone else is fucking stupid. And that's fine. I'll take the opportunity, but they're wrong. Or I fooled them. What do you think when you see a picture of yourself or if you see a video of yourself? Oh, I feel disgusted. But like, is that you or is it, you don't even identify with it? I just don't even know who that is and I hate it. I hate the way it looks. Sometimes I look all right. Sometimes it looks okay, but generally I just try not to. Like I'm not, I really hate having my photograph taken. I really hate a red carpet. I really, I've never watched The Good Place beyond like a few odd scenes that show up on the internet. I can't watch myself. I can't listen to myself back. And so it's probably a while I'll never really develop as an artist because I don't study myself. But it's just. It's hard. I mean, I think I've told this before, but like I've directed Santa specials for people and then you send them, you send it to them and they have to watch themselves for an hour. And it's hard to do. It's really challenging. Like why is my face like, why do I sound like that? Why does my face look like that? Don't cut over to that side. Like just weird shit that people have in their minds because it is, and it is that thing that I'm not convinced of either way, which is like we hate it, but yet we charge people to look at it. Everything is subjective, right? So just because I hate something, loads of people love the things that I hate. So if I hate me, it doesn't mean other people won't love me or enjoy me just because I think I'm a fucking idiot. It doesn't mean someone else won't find some like nuggets of wisdom in what I say. And so I think just put it out there. Just put it out there. Don't try to be the jury and the judge of what is good because who the fuck are you to decide? How can you ever know what's good or what people are going to enjoy? But it's your own, because you have your own standards. So if you have- Yeah, but my standards are just my standards for me. It doesn't mean someone else isn't gonna enjoy it. Right, but then how do you decide what to write or whatever the output is? And then like, man, I don't think it's good, but somebody might. I think at some point there has to be a standard for your own. I just do what I enjoy, right? The TV shows that I pick are based on who's making it, who am I gonna spend time with on set? And am I gonna find it fun to do this project? I never ever, which you can probably see in some of my decisions, like just think what is everyone else gonna think? I never think that. Hey, did you like that? Did you like that? Yeah, did you like it though? You want more? Don't wanna work? Would rather watch videos of me grab assing with people? First of all, go up here to subscribe and then go up here to watch more clips. This is like when the weatherman says there's a high pressure system coming in. I'm not really used to the green screen.