Joe Burrow and model Olivia Ponton reportedly started dating in December 2024. Since then, the couple has shown support for each other on various occasions, but they have always kept their relationship status hush-hush. However, Ponton, a social media influencer, frequently shares snippets of her life with her fans. This time, she decided to open up about her struggle with anorexia.
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Following a workout video about “training like an angel,” the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model felt compelled to address the persistent myth that models do not have to eat much.
“Being anorexic, nine times out of 10, is not going to give you the body that you’re craving, nor desiring,” she shared with her followers on TikTok. “And as someone who has struggled with many, many, many forms of eating disorders, specifically anorexia, I want to talk about this.”
She addressed the broader misconception people have about models or anyone with what is considered an ‘ideal’ body: that they simply don’t eat. But that “couldn’t be further from the truth.” People believe anorexia is the answer to make them the skinniest and best-looking, she explained.
Yet at the height of her eating disorders, Ponton admitted: “I have never looked worse.”
“I looked dull, my body was not going to the ways that I thought it was going to be, and now as someone who does prioritize those things that I was just explaining, I have never felt better, and I’ve never looked better. Personally, I think that when I look in the mirror, I’m like, ‘wow, okay, nice,'” Ponton explained.
The Cincinnati Bengals quarterback’s girlfriend later explained that the reason she mentioned “nine out of ten” is because she did not want to make an assumption about every person who has experienced an eating disorder. She was speaking for herself, not for everyone who has lived it.
Ponton said she left those disordered patterns behind and now feels and looks her best ever. For that, she credits four habits: sleep first, then protein-focused meals, workouts, and cutting out sugary drinks, especially alcohol. Not one of them involves skipping meals, which is exactly her point.
That message carries extra weight given where her struggle began. Years earlier, on the High Low with EmRata podcast, Ponton blamed social media as the reason behind her eating disorder.
“I never had an eating disorder before I had social media,” she said in 2023. “I started actually hating the way I looked. Once I started posting in bikinis, everyone had things to say about my body…so many negative thoughts were always surrounding my body… I started actually hating the way I looked.”
She tied it to the body-shaming that followed her bikini posts and admitted she once believed getting super skinny would solve her problems. It wasn’t very long before she realized the dangerous mindset behind that belief. Thereafter, she began changing her relationship with food. Her new routine suggests she got there.
Ponton’s admission of never looking worse flips the before-and-after story she says people attach to anorexia. Her worst look came at the height of the disorder, and her best now sits on an Ocean Drive cover.