LOVE Island’s Malin Andersson has opened up on how she ‘feels sad for the girl’ who went on the reality show all those years ago.
Malin, 29, cannot even look at photos of herself from around the time she appeared on the ITV2 reality series in 2016, saying she was “dead behind the eyes.”
In an exclusive chat with The Celeb Report ahead of the release of her new book, Positivity Is Our Superpower, Malin revealed Love Island was “not something I think about any more.”
“I was insecure as anything, I had an eating disorder, I had an addiction to lip filler and surgery and when I look back at myself… some company tagged me in a picture of me just after the villa after I got lip filler… that picture triggered me a little bit because I looked so so so skinny and so sad,” Malin said.
“Dead behind the eyes and my mum was literally about to die around that time.”
Saying that “a photo says a million words”, Malin reflected how she “just felt sad for that girl.”
“I had no clue where I was going or what I was doing and where my mind was then. It’s like I was a different person,” she said.
But after a lot of work and “a lot of healing”, Malin is in a much better place and in January gave birth to daughter Xaya.
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Malin described the key to her healing: “The ultimate thing is when we seek love from other people and it doesn’t go our way or you have heartache or someone passes away, it teaches us to love ourselves more, because we are all that we need.
“We just need to turn in to ourselves and I think that is what I started to do, just be more appreciative of what I have and who I am.”
Malin also credited exercise with helping her “mind and to get me up and going but I look in the mirror and I don’t look at what to criticise.”
“I just look at me as a person and what I am doing and achieving. It’s easy to pick out flaws especially in summer. You just have to retrain your mind.”
As the new series of Love Island gets ready for its second week, Malin has some sage advices for the new Islanders, telling them “not to follow the crowd and do what you want to do with your career.”
“Be who you are. Don’t follow the crowd because then you end up losing yourself and you get stuck,” she said.
“I look back and all I wanted to do was do some crap Pas and earn a bit of money on the gram, promoting crap on there, things I didn’t even believe in.
“I didn’t know who I was. The minute I found my purpose and what I wanted to do, everything kind of fell in place.”
Malin also recently showed the awful domestic abuse scar on her neck while calling for more to be done to help victims.
She was beaten by her ex-partner and admits that only the police have seen the worst of the video evidence she covertly recorded.
The star is now campaigning for schools to teach school kids about “what red flags are, what a narcissist is, what’s normal and what isn’t isn’t”.
Malin’s ex boyfriend Tom Kemp, 28, was jailed for 10 months in September 2020 after admitting to actual bodily harm.
Kemp, who the court heard beat Malin ‘black and blue‘, was released just three months after his sentencing at Aylesbury Crown Court.
Malin has now penned a book called Positivity Is Our Superpower. In it, she opens up about her horrendous ordeal.
Posting next to the shocking picture of her neck, Malin offered a ‘trigger warning’ to her fan base.
