Former Victoria's Secret Angel Erin Heatherton went to extreme lengths to stay skinny — and she doesn't want anyone else to do the same.
Erin, who modeled for the brand between 2010 and 2013, says she felt pressure to meet the company's beauty standards and demands of perfectionism in fear of losing her job.
The model opened up about her experience during an upcoming appearance on the Fallen Angel podcast, where she says she was pushed "over the edge a little bit" after gaining weight.
"Where things started to go south for me was when I hit, I think it was 25 [years old]. There was this certain point where everything that I was doing just didn't yield the same results. I was just a little bit bigger. In retrospect, that's just biology and how the body works. You're not the same size when you're 18 to when you're 25," Erin said.
Erin says she turned to a "nutritionist to the stars," who instead of giving health advice, prescribed her an amphetamine-like appetite suppressant and hormones.
"[He] started me on this diet pill called phentermine, which my therapist later called 'bathwater meth.' I don't know...I started injecting myself with HCG [a hormone produced during pregnancy called human chorionic gonadotropin]," Erin explained.
She continued, "I was just like, 'Help me lose weight. What do people do?' He suggested something this other model did that worked for her...I started like a diabetic injecting my stomach every morning."
Looking back, Erin compares it to "emotional cutting" because she was "so against" everything she was doing but "was just reluctantly doing it almost to feel the pain or feel how wrong it was."
"I don't have any faith that these people really cared about me. You know what I'm saying? It's just about business," Erin added.
