Sophie Sumner Opens Up About Eating Disorder and Addiction During TV Fame

British actress and model Sophie Sumner, a former winner of America’s Next Top Model, has revealed the pressure after winning the reality TV series was so severe that she spiralled into addiction and a devastating eating disorder.

The 35-year-old, who has modelled for Vogue Italia, Puma and Rimmel, first found fame in 2009 on Britain’s Next Top Model, where she was mentored by host Lisa Snowdon.

Three years later, she became the first Brit to win America’s Next Top Model in 2012, under judges Tyra Banks and Kelly Cutrone.

She went on to star in E4 reality show Taking New York in 2015 which followed a group of Brits, including Love Island’s Jamie Jewitt, in the Big Apple as they chased love and successful careers. 

But now the Oxford-born beauty – who now works as an actress and podcast presenter – has admitted that while she appeared to be living a fashion fairytale, she was lonely and quietly struggling with alcoholism and bulimia.

‘I won America’s Next Top Model. It was a huge television show, and I should have been on cloud nine,’ Sophie explained on her YouTube channel. ‘I should have been like, this is so exciting and open so many doors!

‘Instead, I was like, oh my gosh, what do I do next? What happens if I never book a job again? Oh my gosh, I didn’t choose to go to college. I was just constantly plagued with negative thoughts instead of optimism and excitement about the next step.’

Despite being projected as the bright, charismatic British girl, behind the scenes, she said her world was falling apart.

‘I’d won one of the biggest shows in the world, yet my self esteem and my self worth were just so small,’ she added. ‘At that time, I think that’s maybe when I turned and started drinking a little bit more. That is how I dealt with things. People deal with things in a lot of different ways.’

Her desire to be thin – the dominant aesthetic in the cut-throat world of modelling – drove her to develop bulimia, which soon began to dominate every hour of the day.

‘My brain would constantly be counting everything. I’m like, okay, I had a slice of bread, so that would be like 200 calories, and now I can only reach 1,000, but then I have to work out…

‘I was constantly in a mental arithmetic. If my brain was a pie chart, so much of it was just on eating, and how not to eat focused on what other people are eating, it was just all-consuming.’

She continued: ‘Sometimes I would go to McDonald’s and buy 24 chicken nuggets and get into bed and eat them and then go to the toilet and throw up and then come back out and eat some ice cream, and then go to the toilet and throw up.

‘It was painful, and I would pop vessels in my eye, and it felt awful, and I was ultimately sat on a bathroom floor, crying in a vicious cycle of trying to get thinner. And it’s just so miserable.’

Her mental and physical decline did not go unnoticed. ‘I got to a weight where one of the biggest agents in England came up to me and was like, ‘Your hair is starting to thin, it is starting to fall out, your skin is turning yellow.’

‘I was viewing myself like, I just need to be skinnier, skinnier. But in fact, I just looked ill. So for me to get help on that, I reached out, I spoke with that agency.

‘Now there are so many people that you can reach out to. There are so many people that understand it and it can stop.’

Sophie said her poor relationship with food and her body began long before she found fame on reality TV. ‘I started modelling at like 15, 16,’ she said. ‘My booker was like, ‘Keep an eye on your hips.’ I didn’t really understand what that meant, but maybe that’s when I started cutting back on food.’

At the same time, she was becoming known for her party-girl persona. ‘I would always be the one to drink that little bit more,’ she said. ‘My confidence would go up when I was drinking… it felt like all these positive things would happen.’

But the drinking quickly became destructive. ‘Instead of going to castings we’d just go out and drink a little bit more,’ she said. ‘My self-esteem was falling low… even though everyone was telling me I was beautiful, I couldn’t have felt worse.’

By her mid-20s, after winning America’s Next Top Model, alcohol had taken over. ‘I lost my modelling agent, I lost my acting agent,’ she said. ‘I basically blew everything up. I self-sabotaged.’

Despite starring on two major TV modelling franchises, she said she had no understanding of mental health or addiction at the time. ‘When I really hit rock bottom, I didn’t know I could ask for help,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have the tools to realise somebody might help me.’

Her turning point came completely by accident – during an acting class. ‘It turned out the acting coach was 20 years sober,’ she said. After sharing her story, ‘something just clicked, and I was like, ‘I need help.’

She reached out to someone she vaguely remembered talking about addiction, who ‘put me in contact with someone… I turned up to a meeting, and I’ve been in a programme ever since – five years now.’

Sophie admitted she hid her sobriety for two years because of deep shame. ‘I was like, I’m different, what’s wrong with me? I just want to go to parties and drink like everyone else.’

But her recovery, she said, rebuilt her life piece by piece. ‘I’ve got another agent, I’ve got a green card, I’ve shot a film, I’ve produced this… all the things I used to say I would do, I have done.’

She now journals every morning, meditates and spends time outdoors as part of her routine. ‘The head is the scariest place,’ she said. ‘I get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper.’

She added that she hopes that sharing her story will help others suffering in silence. ‘There is no worse feeling than sitting on the floor of that bathroom and being paralysed,’ she said. ‘You would never talk to anyone the way you talk to yourself.

‘No one could hurt me more than I could hurt me.’