Princess Delphine suffered from anorexia nervosa for six years. “It got worse and worse,” she says on the radio show. “I developed anorexia as a teenager. I couldn’t stand the chaos around me, and the only thing I could control was my diet. So I chose to stop eating. I didn’t know what was happening to me because I had never heard the word anorexia before,” she admits.

When she was fifteen, she finally hit rock bottom. “My organs were failing,” Delphine remembers well. She weighed only 28 kilograms at that time. “I almost died then.” The doctors wanted to hospitalize Delphine, but according to her psychiatrist, this wasn’t a good idea. She relied on her “will” to get better. “Step by step I got a little better.” Thanks to the Academy of Arts, things finally went better for the princess. “The day I got there, I got better,” she explains. “I had the opportunity to express myself through art. That’s why I believe in art so much now.”

in Delphine: My Story, a three-part docuseries about the life of the princess, Delphine has also spoken candidly about her eating disorder. “I think it was my way of maintaining control. Because everything around me was already uncontrollable. I was 13 or 14 at the time,” the series said. “The doctors told my mother that my heart was weak because I was so thin, so thin. I didn’t have much left.”

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