Layla Taylor is opening up about her road to recovery.
In the newly released season four of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the 25-year-old reality star revealed that she has struggled for years with an eating disorder.
In a new interview, Layla called her eating disorder an ongoing “battle.”
Keep reading to find out more…“It’s still going to be a battle,” Layla told Us Weekly. “I think what people don’t see is that an eating disorder is not just like, a talk about it one time in therapy or take a magic pill and it goes away. It’s something that I’ve struggled with since I was a little girl, so it’s something I probably always will. But I feel like I’m doing better, and I’m in a little bit of a better place. But day by day.”
She went on to share that she’s “still seeking treatment” at an out-patient facility, noting that she began to realize her struggle when she felt “side effects” that are “maybe not present on the outside.”
“I think obviously you see that somebody’s losing weight, but you don’t see that it hurts for them to lay down at night because their joints hurt and my hair is falling out and my nails are breaking off every day,” Layla explained. “I couldn’t sleep throughout the night, and I was exhausted all the time. There’s so many things that you don’t see — I think just the physical that my body literally couldn’t go any longer at the rate that I was at.”
She also found herself thinking of her two sons – Oliver, born in 2021, and Maxwell, born in 2022 – whom she shares with ex-husband Clayton Wessel.
“I think that was just alarming, because at the end of the day, I want to live a long life so I can see my babies grow old and have babies and live their life,” she said. “And I can’t do that if I’m dead.”
Layla noted that she had suffered from her eating disorder prior to getting on GLP-1, adding that she used the weight loss medication as a “crutch.”
“Obviously not eating all day, you’re going to get hunger cues, and that’s the hard part about having an eating disorder, is that you still have those,” Layla said. “So I feel like the GLP-1 was a way to not enable the eating disorder, but in my head, it was a way to make an eating disorder more easy. It was just like an unhealthy crutch.”
She continued, “I’m glad that I don’t abuse that drug anymore. I’m not on it anymore because I still struggle with the body image issues, and that’s always going to be a problem, but at least I’m trying to manage it and not be on something that I knew was enabling it worse.”
Last month, Layla shared an update on her relationship status.
