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Jackie Goldschneider says she has “put on weight” and is “out of the danger zone” amid her recovery from anorexia, which she has battled — mostly privately — for the better part of two decades.
“I’m about six or seven months really in [recovery] now,” the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star, 45, exclusively tells Page Six. “I have expanded to a team instead of just the one therapist. So I speak to my therapist twice a week, I speak to a medical nutritionist once a week and I have a women’s wellness physician.
“I’m learning how to eat normally and intuitively, and I’ve put on weight,” she notes, though she does not know how many pounds she has gained because she is “not allowed to get on the scale.”
Still, Goldschneider shares that she is just happy to be “out of the danger zone in terms of health problems” stemming from her eating disorder.
The “danger zone” for the Bravolebrity included decreased organ function and a heart that was “not operating” at full capacity, along with “very low” blood pressure, estrogen levels and iron levels.
She was also “always freezing” because she “wasn’t eating enough calories to regulate [her] temperature.”
Though she has spoken about her struggles since her first season on the reality series in 2018, Goldschneider acknowledges that she tried to make it seem as though her anorexia was behind her. She tells us it was her way of “getting ahead” of any comments about her appearance.
On both the show and social media, the reality star has shared that she underwent in vitro fertilization in order to bring two sets of twins — Jonas and Adin, 13, and Alexis and Hudson, 11 — into the world with her husband, Evan Goldschneider.
But she confirms to us that the reason she “couldn’t have children naturally” is because she was not consuming enough food to ovulate or menstruate.
Then, once she became pregnant the first time, Goldschneider could not stop herself from obsessing over the inevitable weight gain.
“It was very, very hard,” she tells us — so hard that she “went to a pregnancy nutritionist and said, ‘I know this is going to sound crazy, but please tell me what the minimum amount I have to eat is in order to have healthy babies.’
“And I ate that exact minimum,” she recalls. “I didn’t eat one thing over that. Looking back, it’s like, how do you even do that? But it’s all mental. It’s a mental illness.”
Though she has put on weight since her 20s — when she was admittedly “skeletal” — Goldschneider cautions that “one of the misconceptions people don’t understand” is that “it’s not just about being super skinny. You can be any weight and have an eating disorder.”
It was not until May 2021 that the Staten Island native became honest with herself. She had been running religiously with an injured hamstring. With tears streaming down her face from a combination of physical pain and mental anguish, she finally “sat down and really let myself for a second consider what life would be like if I did stop.”
“And I thought, ‘What if I put it out there and do it on the show?’” she remembers thinking. “So a big part of it was to help keep me accountable, but another part of it was that eating disorders are very lonely.”
“I’m not trying to be a martyr,” she makes sure to note. “I just want other people to know that you can be at your rock bottom and still come out of this, and it doesn’t take forever, and you can live a totally happy life in a fit body.”
Before deciding to open up on camera, Goldschneider confided in her best friend and co-star Margaret Josephs, who was in her corner as she navigated the process of making her struggles public.
Goldschneider says she immediately got support from castmates Melissa Gorga and Dolores Catania but “didn’t hear” from either Teresa Giudice or Jennifer Aydin.
“It’s OK,” she says. “I mean, I know what my relationship with them is, so it’s fine.”
When asked about this week’s “RHONJ” episode featuring the ladies’ charity softball game, during which Giudice, 49, made a comment about how 54-year-old Josephs’ butt would “jiggle” less in a pair of Giudice’s leggings, Goldschneider all but cringes.
“I just think it’s such a shame that women do that to other women,” she tells us. “One of the reasons why I spiraled into this was — and I’m not putting it on other people — but some of the comments that I would get about my body never left me. … So I just think that it’s very dangerous to body-shame another woman because you never know how they’re going to take it and what they’re going to do with it.”
Goldschneider also does not hesitate when asked whether she feels Giudice’s remark had malicious intent, replying, “I do.”
After all, she knows all too well that recovering from an eating disorder is twofold, so while she feels she is currently “in a good place physically,” she is still working on “getting there mentally.”
“I can tell that I’m in a new size, which is difficult for me, but I know that it’s necessary,” she shares. “I still struggle coming to terms with living in a bigger body, not being thin anymore. I was always the fittest person in the room, and I liked that identity.
“I’m just so happy that I finally felt confident enough with where I was in life and the things I had accomplished that I didn’t need being thin to take up so much of my identity anymore.”
As for the upcoming “RHONJ” Season 12 reunion, which Goldschneider filmed less than 12 hours before this interview, she teases, “There was a shocking fight between two cast members that I did not expect. Of the four reunions I’ve attended, this was the longest and the wildest.”
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