Growing up in the Duggar household may not have been exactly as it was shown on 19 Kids & Counting. Jinger Duggar spilled all the tea of the struggles the family faced to feed 21 mouths on the latest episode of her podcast with husband Jeremy Vuolo.
“I remember a few times when we were very young some of my siblings would take their food, take their plate of food — get ready for this, it’s disgusting — in the bathroom, they would carry it and put it on the bathroom counter, my mom would be like, ‘Don’t do that.’ They’re like, ‘They’re going to eat it,’” Jinger, 30, recalled during the August 1 episode of “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast.” “That’s literally what they thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to eat my food because somebody’s going to take it and we might not have enough for seconds today.’”
While some kids were eating meals in the bathrooms in order to hide food, Jinger went on to discuss the difficulties of sharing just two bathrooms between the large family. “There was constantly a line and the water would not stay hot very long, so if you wanted to have a hot shower, you needed to be one of the first two or three in there,” she continued. “I think when we were younger that was more of a problem because we only had two bathrooms in most of our rental homes.”
The shocking revelations come nearly two years after Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s sixth child released her bombshell memoir, Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear, in which she went into detail about her upbringing in the Institute of Basic Life Principles.
“While this is not the first book I’ve written, it is the most challenging,” Jinger wrote in the book’s introduction. “The process has been far more emotionally exhausting than I thought it would be. It’s been tough because it’s so personal. At times, I’ve wondered if I should even write it. But I know it’s necessary.”
One of the shocking revelations Jinger dropped in her January 2023 memoir, was of her battle with an eating disorder in her early teenage years. While she now admits she and her siblings would eat canned foods right “out of the can,” she previously struggled with body image issues that caused her to eat “very little.”
“[I was] convinced my body was an embarrassment,” she wrote. “I’d go days hardly consuming any calories. My weight dropped, but my body image didn’t improve. It almost never does in those situations because the weight isn’t the problem. No matter how thin I was, I wasn’t satisfied with the way I looked. This obsession with body image was terrible for my physical health and it certainly wasn’t good for me spiritually.”
“I felt no judgment from [my mom], just love and care,” Jinger continued. “I knew I was going to be okay because she had been through it.”
Jinger is set to release a follow-up to Becoming Free Indeed titled People Pleaser: Breaking Free from the Burden of Imaginary Expectations in January 2025.
