Candace Cameron Bure details journey with disordered eating

Candace Cameron Bure is diving into her relationship with her body.

On Tuesday, the actress, 49, dropped the latest season of her “Candace Cameron Bure Podcast,” which focuses on “lifelong struggles with body image, disordered eating, and mental exhaustion,” alongside guest Lisa Whittle.

During the first episode of Season 11, Bure revealed when her eating disorder started.

“I developed an eating disorder when I was 18,” the sitcom star shared. “It was binging and purging, like, I’m a bulimic. I still say I’m a bulimic because the thoughts, whether I’m doing that or not, never leave me. I still need the tools to say, ‘No, Candace, we’re not doing that.’”

Bure grew up in the spotlight while starring on “Full House” for eight seasons from 1987 to 1995. After the series ended, she moved to Montreal with her now-husband, Valeri Bure, to support his hockey career. During that time, Bure started binging and purging.

The Great American Family CCO praised her partner of 29 years for being an “incredible support” system amid her struggles.

“I feel like a broken record,” Bure confessed. “I’m 49 years old, and I’m, like, ‘Why do I think about this so much? Why does it even matter so much? It’s so ridiculous.’ And yet, I’m still thinking about it [and] we’re here talking about it.”

The “Ainsley McGregor Mysteries” star added, “I’m glad we’re talking about it, but I just wish, in general, that this was not a conversation that we all had to have.”

Bure admitted that she’s struggled with these issues for decades.

“I’m reading everything I can. I want all the information,” she confessed. “There’s certainly been amazing things and tools that have helped me along the way, but there’s still nothing that has really changed my heart and soul on it. I still constantly think about it. It’s really vulnerable, but so many of us feel the same feelings.”

Growing up in Hollywood added an extra layer of pressure for the podcast host, who landed the ABC show before she was even a teenager.

Bure told Whittle that she had always been hyperconscious of food starting at a young age.

“Everyone in my house was always on a diet,” she said. “My mom was always on a diet. My sisters were always on a diet. I was always put on a diet.”

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, you have to lose weight.’ It’s just, ‘We’re gonna do this as preventative. We want to teach you how to be healthy and exercise,’” she recalled. “That completely shaped the viewpoint that I had about myself, and the feelings about my body, like, ‘Oh, I have to make decisions because there’s a fear that I could develop an eating disorder because I’m on TV.’”

She added, “Because that’s the pressure, and I don’t want to be too fat compared to other actors because then producers might tell me that I need to lose weight.”

“My parents never wanted a producer to come up to me and say, like, ‘We need your child to lose weight,’ so let’s do everything preventative.”

In fact, Bure praised her parents, Barbara and Robert Cameron, for doing “the best job in protecting me.”

Tracey Gold, who starred on “Growing Pains” with her older brother Kirk Cameron, developed an eating disorder, and she eventually sought treatment.  

At that point, Bure’s parents “were really afraid” for the young actress.

“I had cheeks and I had thicker arms and I was, like, a normal 12-year-old, you know? I really was a normal 12-year-old, but I had a little bit more fat on me than other kids on TV,” Bure recalled. “They were just fearful that I would develop an eating disorder, just because of all of the pressures.”

However, it was those conversations that sparked Bure to focus on her body and her relationship with food.

“That very thing just shaped the way I looked at my body, which was like, ‘Oh, it’s not good enough the way it is right now,’” the star explained.

“That kind of started young,” she admitted, adding that it continued “through my teenage years.”

In 2021, Bure, who shares kids Natasha, 26, Lev, 25, and Maksim, 23, with Val, detailed how people still come up to her and comment on her body.

“It’s still today the most common comment that gets spoken to me is, like, ‘Wow, you’re so small! Wow, you’re thin!’ It was always … even as a child, like, ‘Wow, you’re a lot smaller in person than you look on TV. You’re so chubby on TV,’” she told Yahoo! Entertainment at the time.

“When you hear those things over and over again, and they become so repetitive, it can often become your identity to an extent, or it makes you perceive yourself in a way that you didn’t even think you were, because other people keep speaking that into you.”

Despite the outside noise, Bure said she is doing “great.”

“I think when you struggle with something like that, it never goes away, but you have the tools in place to know how to handle it when those temptations or urges arise … so that you don’t go back to old patterns. And I’m sure that’s gonna be the way it will be for the rest of my life.”

However, Bure is thrilled that in today’s society, people are embracing all body sizes.

“I’m so glad that the culture is different today,” she gushed.

“One thing we’ve done a great job with is encouraging body confidence, body positivity and that all shapes and sizes are beautiful,” Bure continued.

“It makes raising a daughter — and sons — but a daughter, that much easier, because we have great role models and the message across the board from the media and magazines is very different than it was, you know, in ’80s and ’90s.”