'Company' 's Jennifer Simard Transforms the Pain of Her Past Anorexia Battle into Humor on Broadway

Jennifer Simard is one of Broadway's funniest stars, her hilarious performances in shows like Hello, Dolly!, Mean Girls and Disaster! earning her praise from critics and audiences alike — and a Tony nomination for Disaster!

She's now starring in the acclaimed revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company, playing Sarah — a spirited woman and wife addicted to diet and exercise.

It's a role that earns Simard plenty of laughs, but one that really hits home for the 51-year-old actress.

"I've never talked about this in any interview in my life, but I am a recovering anorexic," she tells PEOPLE exclusively. "And while Sarah's issues with food and her body may not be as deep as anorexia, I know what it's like to be obsessed with this part of life. I have a lot of layers to bring to this character, I can relate to her."

"This has also given me this opportunity to really address my eating disorder for the first time on stage," she adds. "I feel really blessed that I get to do a role like this where I can use that. It's been a very empowering, very cathartic experience."

Simard was a teenager when she first began limiting her diet, her weight reaching 90 lbs. at just 15 years old.

She recalls the moment she realized she needed help. "I was trying on clothes at a store and somehow I was able to look through my body dysmorphia. Somehow I saw it," Simard says. "I put on this gown that was essentially strapless and it fell off of me; it was a size zero and it couldn't stay up on my body. And then I put on a pair of jeans and looked in the mirror and saw my bones. I saw I was tinier on top than on my hip bones. And I said, 'Oh... that's my shape.' "

"Somehow, something just clicked," she continues. "I just looked at myself and I knew that I was being really unkind to myself and that I should love my bone structure as it is. ... Thank God because I don't know if I would've survived it otherwise. I kept getting lower and lower and lower."

Recovering has been a lifelong journey, but started with Simard seeking help from both a psychotherapist and a nutritionist, whom she says "worked hand in hand."

"I knew I needed therapy but I can't stress enough how important the nutritionist was," she remembers. "So much of anorexia is about control, and the nutritionist really helped. She kept me honest. I had to get on a scale every week in her office. There was no getting around that. And the threshold for me was, she told me if I got down beneath 90 lbs., she would have to put me in the hospital. That was, for me, the biggest fear. So both her and my therapist were my touchstones for me."

The actress also thanks her parents, who she says were "terrific" and got her the help that she needed.

"It was extremely difficult on my parents, you must understand, to feel helpless," Simard says. "My dad used to tell me he would see me — I used to walk up and down this hill behind on house 50 times in the morning, then go for a two mile bike ride in the afternoon, and then do the original Jane Fonda workout at night, all while eating extremely small portions of food during the day — and my dad told me how nervous he was, watching me do that over and over again. But there was nothing they could do, I needed to get there on my own."

Nowadays, Simard says she's learned to love her body. "I've been every size from 0 to a 14 and right now, I'm somewhere between an 8 and 10, what you would classify as a medium. And I stay active and eat food that I know is going to nourish my body with vitamins and minerals, but recovery has helped me get to the point where — I don't even want to say body positivity, it's more, 'This is my body,' " she says.

"Emotionally, I'm in a much better place where I stay on the other side of it," she goes on. "It's a lot of self talk because the pressure is constant from other people in the peanut gallery commenting on what you look like. But I pull through by constantly remind myself, 'I'm enough and I'm beautiful.'

"Like, just last year, I asked my doctor 'What's this little poof over here?' And my doctor said, "Oh, you have fibroids so you're going to look like you're three months pregnant until you get a hysterectomy.' At the height of my eating disorder, that would have broken me but I was like, 'Okay!' I reminded myself, 'You've done nothing wrong.' This is my body and this is what happens. I'm standing confident it."

Brad Robertson, Simard's husband of nearly 18 years, has reinforced that confidence.

"He's the yin to my yang, I'm very lucky," Simard gushes. "He just balances me out. With him, I'm definitely more extroverted and he's more introverted, and his calmness and sensitivity has helped ground me. He just loves me for all the things I didn't used to feel lovable about myself. I couldn't ask for a more loving, sensitive partner."

She's even learned to love parts of herself she previously hated. "My thighs were always the source of pain in high school, in my teen years, and through my adult life. But now I've embraced them," she explains. "It's not lost on me that the very things that I used to think were shameful are the things I'm most proud of now. And the thing that helps me in [Company], when my character practices jujitsu, frankly. Because I'm built for it!"

One of the biggest laughs she gets in the show is when she lifts her shirt and exposes her stomach to the audience, something Simard says she never would have been able to do had it not been for the recovery journey.

"That moment, I swear to you, is so freeing," she says. "My thought was, in nature, it's literally the most vulnerable thing an animal can do is to show their belly. When Sarah does that, she's showing all of herself and I, in turn, am doing the same. I kind of slap it, like, 'This is me. This is all of it.' And the audience, they cheer — they applaud — because they can feel themselves in it. They're not laughing at me, they're laughing with me and with themselves."

Simard says humor has carried her through it all, and also helps her look back on her journey with strength.

"The best comedy comes through an acknowledgement of one's pain. And when you're brave enough to confront your pain, you're brave enough to do anything," she says. "If I may speak nicely of myself, I think I am a brave person."

Company is now open at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York, New York.

If you or someone you know is battling an eating disorder, please contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) at 1-800-931-2237 or go to NationalEatingDisorders.org.