Weighing myself for 21 yrs was waste of happiness, time: Jameela Jamil

Actor-model Jameela Jamil was hiding a "dark secret" for a long time: about checking her weight every day for 21 years.

"The Good Place" star revealed she felt miserable for over two decades until she stopped inflicting pain on herself last year.

"I ended up weighing myself every single day of my life until last year. That's 21 f***ing years of waking up every morning and my entire mood for the day being determined by the number on a stupid little machine in my bathroom.

"What a horrifying waste of happiness. What a horrifying waste of time. What a sad thing for a bright girl who technically knew better, to keep as her deep, dark secret for so long," Jamil wrote in an essay for Stylist magazine.

The actor, who has been vocal about her struggle with eating disorders and fixating on being a certain body type, said her body image issues began when she was publicly weighed at school and discovered she was the heaviest among her classmates.

"Throughout my teens and early 20s I was consumed by all of it. I would pass out from lack of nutrition. My periods stopped for a year. I was so thin at one point that I got bed sores from my own mattress," she said.

She felt "depressed" and "weak", Jamil, 33, added.

The actor said young girls being pressured into losing weight and look a certain way predates the mushrooming of social media platforms.

"Diet culture was on an aggressive rampage, using fat-shaming, Photoshop and erasure of all curves to pressure us into buying dodgy quick-fix slimming products.

"This all f***ed me up as a young person - and I didn't grow up with social media," the I Weigh founder said.