People who remember the sunny little girl, Carol Seavers, on "Growing Pains" would be surprised to see Tracey Gold today. An energetic, 42-year-old wife and mother of four boys, she not only overcame the burdens of being a child actress, she also vanquished an eating disorder that almost killed her.
Gold is trying to help other women who find themselves in the grip of anorexia or bulimia, the way she was when "Growing Pains" ended after seven years.
"After being out there and so public about my own struggle, I would always have people come up to me and say, 'My daughter ...' 'My sister ...' 'My friend ...' They go off into a corner and talk to me quietly about it," she says over a soda at a hotel here.
"I began to feel like there needed to be a light shone on it for there to be more exposure. It was always such a hushed, quiet thing that people were embarrassed about. I just wanted to show eating disorders the way they truly are and take the idea of throwing the word 'anorexic' around so lightly, and also take on the idea that it's somehow a glamorous thing."
To combat this sinister disease Gold is hosting a reality show, "Starving Secrets with Tracey Gold," premiering Friday on Lifetime.
The show was her idea. "I watch TV and understand what people are watching and I thought through my involvement it could be something that was really good. So I approached GRB, the production company which does the show 'Intervention' who I had a relationship with before, and thought they'd be perfect to produce the show."
Gold's own ordeal began with an innocent diet. "I'd always been a skinny, thin child and when I was around 18, 19 I started to gain little bit of weight. I was told by the producers that I needed to lose weight," she says.
"There were also some fat jokes written in the script about my character. When you're writing about my character's body you're also writing about me. It hurt my feelings, and I was sensitive about it, but I didn't do anything drastic ... But then when I was ordered to lose weight I had to take it seriously and my parents took it seriously, and I was put on a very strict diet. And I lost about 20 pounds in a month, really quick," says Gold, who's dressed in a dark gray pin-striped jacket and black top.
She received so much positive reinforcement with that weight loss that she kept at it. "I'd gone on such an extreme diet that once I hit my goal weight it was OK. Now I can move on. I didn't really know how to eat healthy. I knew how to be the girl who ate what I wanted or be the girl who was completely restricted. I didn't know a happy balance. So it started to cycle."
For a year she binged and starved. "I was maintaining a healthy weight. I appeared to be healthy, but my behavior was not. Then at the end of that year I met my husband. I was 20 and it was the first time I'd ever fallen in love. My world was really changed. I went from child actress, working, coming home, working, being with my family. I was far from Los Angeles, was very sheltered. And I met him.
"And I remember one day we were going out to dinner on a Wednesday night and we'd only been dating a couple weeks and he said, 'What do you want for dinner?' I said, 'I don't eat during the week.' He's like, 'What?'"
Her husband, Roby Marshall, proved to be not only the love of her life, but one of the factors that helped her overcome her disorder.
"My husband is from New Jersey, not a Hollywood background," she says. "And it was a shock to him. He'd never known what that was, but he was really in love with me and that was the key. We have a bond that from the moment we met, that was it. It was going to take a lot to tear us apart. But it was hard. He tried loving me, getting mad at me, holding me, pushing me away — everything. But I'm a big believer: I could have a million knights in white horses trying to save me, but until I was ready to get better it wasn't going to happen."
She would eat lunch with cast members on the set in her dressing room. As soon as everyone left, she would purge. Marshall came to the set one day with a hammer and nails. "He nailed shut my bathroom door so I couldn't use it anymore. He was extremely helpful, to this day, he's been with it all the time and knows all the little tricks," she smiles.
While she occasionally performs, her main job, she says, is being a wife and mother to her boys, ages 14, 12, 7 and 3.
That's a whole new challenge, she says. "I'm a girly-girl who loves clothes and makeup and all those things, and I'm not exactly rough and tumble. But once you have boys you have to kind of go with the flow a little bit and find your inner tomboy somewhere."
1 comments:
Thank you so much for printing this. i love Tracey Gold and am really looking forward to this program.
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