Brat Pack star Ally Sheedy’s weight loss ‘fixation’ she overcame

Ally Sheedy rose to fame as a member of the Brat Pack following her starring role in St. Elmo’s Fire at the age of 23, and while it should have been the most exciting time of her life, she has revealed that behind the scenes, she was feeling pressure over her appearance.

The Single Drunk Female star has spoken candidly about the comments she received on her weight, dress sense and facial appearance, writing in 2018 that she missed out on an early film role because of her body. “I was five seven and weighed about 130 pounds,” she wrote.

Body image struggles from childhood

Ally’s body image concerns started from an early age, when she began training with the American Ballet Theater at just seven years old. She previously explained: “The minute I first stepped onstage at Lincoln Center I felt at home. But as soon as I hit puberty and my body started changing, I was really not in the running anymore to be a professional ballerina. I went nuts. I felt like my body was conquering me and my will and I couldn’t command it into a different shape.”

Unfortunately, this early experience, combined with Hollywood pressure, led to Ally developing an eating disorder, and she has been open about having bulimia in her twenties, along with an addiction to sleeping pills.

The mother-of-one wrote a book of poetry about her battles with her eating disorder, addiction and depression in 1991, and once told The Telegraph that she moved back to New York to live as “far outside Hollywood and LA as I possibly could” as part of her recovery.

“Everyone is talking about my weight!”

After being told to lose weight in the 1980s, Ally was later criticised for being “unsettlingly thin” in the nineties. In an interview with Salon, she commented on people’s fascination with her weight, and admitted that while she once had a “fixation” with her weight, it was something she had since managed to overcome. “It’s so funny, I’ve gotten beyond my problems with my weight, beyond my fixation with weight and now all of a sudden everyone is talking about my weight!” she said.

“What’s this about? Is it because I’ve been heavier in the past? Is it because I’ve talked about my bulimia? I’m not practising that anymore,” she said, adding that her weight loss was related to genetics, growing out of her weight obsession and having a child.

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“I went through all this stuff working on my bulimia, going to the therapists, for years. What happened was I hit my 30s, and all of a sudden, I was not spending so much time thinking about my weight, because there were too many other things going on. It was almost like I exhausted it. I don’t know, maybe I just got normal. I don’t have time to obsess about my weight, because now I’m obsessing about my kid.”

A long-time vegetarian

Apart from discussing her eating disorder, Ally hasn’t spoken much about her daily diet or fitness routine, other than to disclose that she has been a vegetarian since the age of 12.

As a health coach, I think it is understandable that Ally may not choose to speak about her dietary habits publicly after having a complex relationship with food and body image. Doing so could feel reductive or even damaging to the recovery she worked hard to achieve. 

Despite her early career success, the 63-year-old now largely stays out of the public eye, dividing her time between working as a college professor and editor alongside occasional acting work.