Troian Bellisario talks about her Eating Disorder and Her New Film

Troian Bellisario is known for playing Spencer in the Freeform hit Pretty Little Liars. Now she’s brutally honest about her ongoing battle with anorexia and how it helped her with her new film Feed. According to allure.com, in an interview with Interview magazine, Bellisario spoke on how, even though she had a strong support system; her illness was extremely isolating.

“I couldn’t get anyone to understand what that experiencing was truly like for me, I couldn’t quite get them to understand that it was about control on a very, very literal level”, she shared with PLL director Lesli Linka Glatter. Like so many others in America dealing with this same disorder, it’s a battle that she fights on a daily basis.

“Once you have this mental illness or this disease, it never really goes away, you will always feel this compulsion,” she states, “but as you grow older and create a healthier life and with loads of therapy, you tend to feel more empowered”.

It was with these two factors; empowerment and lack of understanding from others, that inspired

her to share her story in its rawest form in her new movie, Feed. She wrote, directed and stars in the film. It was hard filming the film because, “it was like poking a sleeping dragon,” Bellisario said in her process of confronting her eating disorder through her art.

The movie is about two twins who were basically raised at the hip, but when something tragic happens to one of them, he/she must learn how to live without them. This film is something that runs deep to Bellisario, because she struggles to live without her brother, and says this film makes her feel closer to him and feels "good" about "closing one chapter".

“My neural pathways were still there and connected to the diseases, but it’s amazing that you can this huge life-threatening thing a part of you and be able to almost tame it in a way.”

This isn’t the first time she has spoken out about her disease; she told Seventeen magazine back in 2014 and again in 2016 in a powerful voting PSA for Hilary Clinton.

Her film Feed is an indie teen drama that is set to premiere on July 18th.

Check out the trailer below: