This past week, a young actress in the prime of her life, passed away. Brittany Murphy, just 32 years old died of cardiac arrest. I didn’t hear about it on the news, my daughter told me. The first thing I said when my daughter told me was, “I bet they’ll say she died from a cardiac related issue.”  I was right. How did I know? I knew because I have watched this lovely actress go from healthy and energetic to skeletal and exhausted in the past few years. Some say it could be drugs, while others say she had an eating disorder. I simply see her as yet another casualty in the “perfect Hollywood body” syndrome. But my observation suggests an eating disorder was part of the problem. An eating disorder such as anorexia can cause hair loss, infertility, stunted growth, osteoporosis, heart problems, kidney failure, and death.

As women in Hollywood receive more praise for their “miracle” weight loss ( post babies) or praise for losing weight prior to walking the red carpet, it seems to be all that we read about. Who has gained weight and who has lost weight. Imagine those that haven’t yet developed the thick skin necessary to shrug off comments about their body? My hunch is Brittany Murphy succumbed to that pressure and struggled to become more successful with less weight.

Personally, I can’t imagine the pressure in Hollywood, it’s bad enough in the real world. I am all about finding your healthiest you, finding the lifestyle that takes you to a healthy place versus a place of obsession and depression. After losing close to 50 pounds almost 30 years ago, I can’t help but feel grateful that I took the healthy route.

I’m in an industry where you need to be fit, I’m a trainer and I probably wouldn’t get a whole lot of interest in my training if I didn’t walk the walk. But that’s just it, the walk I walk is to make healthy choices as often as I can. If I felt pressure to be perfect or achieve a perfect body, my choices would be dangerously different, of that I’m sure.

I tell my clients every week, “Focus on being the best you that you can. A healthy you that is attainable, not through crazy diets or obsessive exercise routines, rather finding your center. Yes, you need to exercise and yes you need to eat well to have a healthy body. But you need to pay attention to how you FEEL. Unhealthy weight loss efforts will rarely leave you feeling good, strong and healthy. So, seek  healthy options, NOT just weight loss options.”  Unfortunately, in the world of Hollywood, healthy options are few and far between as most are seeking perfection. It’s too bad Brittany didn’t realize that perfection doesn’t exist in the real world.