Hoda Hajirnia felt helpless.
“I was in high school when my mom got diagnosed with a life-threatening illness,” the Real Estate Wars star, 30, tells PEOPLE. “My older brother was off at college and my little sister was a newborn, so I felt responsible for helping take care of the family — but I felt useless.”
Hajirnia has decided to keep the specifics of her mother’s illness private but the Bravo reality show personality says watching her mother suffer led her to find a way to control at least one aspect of her life: what she ate.
“I turned to anorexia,” the Southern California native says of developing the eating disorder during her senior year of high school.
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