Layla Taylor is opening up about her road to recovery after sharing her eating disorder on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 4.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 4.
“It’s still going to be a battle,” Layla, 25, exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the season 4 premiere, which aired on Thursday, March 12. “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.”
Layla shared that she is “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,” she said. “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.”
Layla also found herself thinking of her two sons, whom she shares with ex-husband Clayton Wessel. (Layla and Clayton welcomed son Oliver in 2021 and son Maxwell in 2022 before splitting.)
“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, who explained that she suffered from her eating disorder prior to getting on GLP-1, noted 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,” she 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.”
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is streaming now.
If you or someone you know struggles with an eating disorder, visit the National Alliance for Eating Disorders website or call their hotline at (866) 662-1235. Text “ALLIANCE” to 741741 for free, 24/7 support.
