Two years after Amelia Hamlin opened up about battling anorexia, Lisa Rinna’s daughter revealed that her eating disorder got so bad, she was ‘months’ away from dying when her family intervened.
“For me, it was, whatever day, waking up and looking in the mirror and being like, ‘Holy guacamole, you are really skinny, and it is very scary,’” Amelia Gray Hamlin, 19, said during the Aug. 25 episode of The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast. During the chat, Lisa Rinna’s daughter went into her details with her eating disorder. Though she first opened up about her battle in 2018, she went into detail in this podcast, telling hosts Lauryn Evarts and Michael Bosstick that she may have lost her life had her family not gotten involved. “I woke up one morning at my childhood’s best friend’s house. It was seven in the morning. My parents, my sister, they’re all outside, like waiting to pick me up. And I’m like, ‘What are you doing here? Like it’s Saturday morning.’ And they’re like, ‘Get in the car. We’re going to UCLA [to get treatment],” she said.
“And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And in that moment, I was like, ‘I’m going to rebel, like, they’re crazy. I don’t have an eating disorder,’” continued the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star. “We show up, it’s like this really scary old man’s office. …He looked at me and – I took this man seriously, he was very legit scary – he looked at me, and he was like, ‘so yeah, basically at this rate in about four months, you’re going to be 45 pounds, and you’re going to be dead.’ And I just remember, ‘wait, what? That’s humanly possible?’”
This was the reality check that the young teen Amelia needed. “I just snapped out of it. Like I was so lucky that I was just like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be 45 pounds,’” she said. “I’m not going to be this type of person. I’m not going to ruin my life because of whatever issues I’m having. You don’t need to be skinny to, like, live your best life. Like it’s either ‘be skinny and die’ or like, happy and be who you are.”
Amelia said she was “like 14 or 15,” during an “awkward stage,” when her eating disorder began. She remembered she felt shocked over some paparazzi photos taken of her with her mom. “I remember crying to [Lisa Rinna] about,” she said, before saying that she learned of the Master Cleanse from a “model that I looked up to.” Amelia did The Master Cleanse – drinking a concoction made up of water, fresh lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and pure organic maple syrup – for 25 days. She allowed herself some occasional soup or a few sweet potato fries. She also amped up her workout routine. “Even if it was one in the morning, like I would go in the gym ’cause I was living at my parents’ house, and I would just work out, run on the treadmill.” Ultimately, she couldn’t keep up the masquerade that nothing was wrong – and her family intervened before it was too late.
Amelia revealed her battle in 2018 on Instagram. “I could go on and on about that time in my life, but the most important part about it was waking up one morning and deciding to stop sabotaging myself,” she wrote in the IG post’s caption. “My health, my physical health, my mental health, and everything about myself. Once I got the help that I needed, I began to try to love myself for me.”
During a 2019 episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Lisa said she couldn’t “help but blame” herself for her daughter’s eating disorder. “The scariest thing about anorexia is….is she going to have this forever?” Lisa said in a confessional. “I don’t want to see her suffer. You want to fix it. You want to make it go away. You want to erase it. You know, you just want to take your child out of pain. You don’t want your child to be in pain. You can’t help but blame yourself. You know, it’s like…what did we do to f*** her up? Maybe we did something. I don’t know. I just know that it’s really, really hard to watch Amelia be in pain.”