SAS Australia: Isabelle Cornish reveals eating disorder battle
SAS Australia star Isabelle Cornish has opened up about the health battle she’s struggled with on-and-off for years.
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Actor Isabelle Cornish likes to tell people her poison became her passion.
Detailing the eating disorder she’s battled on-and-off for many years, the 27-year-old SAS Australia contestant has spoken up in the hope of helping others.
“It definitely affects your whole life, eating disorders are a serious mental health issue and they affect every single part of your life,” Cornish, younger sister of Hollywood star Abbie Cornish, told The Daily Telegraph.
“Being in the media or just being a young woman or anyone growing up in this modern world, we can be very influenced about our external image so I suffered a lot with body image. I had periods where I suffered from an eating disorder on and off. I didn’t know how to deal with my emotions and all the stress and everything so an eating disorder was kind of my coping mechanism.”
Cornish has been acting for a decade, landing her first gig on Rescue: Special Ops and moving on to Home and Away and TV drama Puberty Blues in 2012. She moved to the US when that show wrapped in 2014, which is when she started obsessing about food and her body.
“When I was super young, like 18, I did have bulimia for a year and then it went away and I was fine for a couple of years and then it came back in a different form,” explained Cornish, who is currently being seen on screen alongside Nicole Kidman in hit US series, Nine Perfect Strangers. “It came back like being obsessive compulsive around food, avoiding certain food groups and not eating enough.”
The body image struggle led Cornish to educate herself on food psychology and yoga to help deal with the stress.
“Studying was the catalyst of my healing journey,” she explained. “I recovered from my eating disorder and studied all different sorts of things so I like to say my poison became my passion. Everyone does feel this image pressure at some point in their life, so that has become my passion.”
Cornish is passionate about helping others and has written her first book, The Why: Healthy Habits for an Epic Life.
Just last week she did her exams for her Certificate Four in Personal Training.
“You’ve got to come through the other side and understand to be able to talk about it. I like to say that resistance creates persistence so once you open and share these things, it becomes easier,” she said, adding of gruelling reality show, SAS Australia: “I’ve always been pushing myself to the limit in terms of my own fitness.
“This was the perfect opportunity to try new things, to push my limits and face fears that I might have and see what I am made of. It was also a great opportunity for me to show other women especially that you can go on and do something like this if you want to do it. It is not just a man’s world, women can be super strong and do the same things that the guys can do.”
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