Maluma Talked About His Eating Disorder in Miami This Week and Latinas Who Have Been There Heard Every Word

Maluma stood in front of an industry room at Billboard Latin Music Week in Miami this week and said out loud that he still deals with a great deal of anxiety, that he had an eating disorder he did not even recognize while it was happening, and that there were stretches of his career where he woke up every day with a headache that would not go away. For a Colombian man with his level of fame to say these things in public, on a panel, with cameras rolling, is the kind of disclosure that does not happen often enough in our community, and it deserves to be received with the seriousness it was offered.

I make up part of that data. Like Maluma, I have lived with eating disorders since my teenage years, and those disorders pulled anxiety and depression in behind them. I have general anxiety disorder and chronic depression, and the eating disorders have always been at the center of it all. Watching Maluma break down while describing what these conditions have cost him personally was not uncomfortable to witness. It was a relief.

What Maluma Actually Said

At the mental health panel during Billboard Latin Music Week, Maluma was direct about the fact that his public image had been built on a version of his body that required something unhealthy from him. He described an obsession with food that took hold in the years when he was expected to show up to Calvin Klein campaigns with a defined abdomen, and he said he had no idea at the time that what he was experiencing qualified as an eating disorder. He told the room he had been “rayado,” a Colombian way of saying he had been out of his mind with it, and that the pressure had consumed him in ways he was only now able to name clearly.

He also talked about fatherhood. His daughter París is two years old and his son Orión was born in September, and he said the birth of París had been the most intense experience of his life, one that sent him into a dimension he could only begin to understand with the help of therapists and other professionals. He spoke about having what he described as very feminine energy and about how becoming a father for the first time rearranged something fundamental in him. With Orión’s arrival, he said things have felt different, that he has found a kind of equilibrium and that his second child has given him a specific kind of courage he did not have before.

He made clear that the work is ongoing. He said he engages in some form of therapy every single day and that the book “Atomic Habits” has been a practical tool for him. He was not presenting himself as someone who had figured it out. He was presenting himself as someone still in the process, which is the more honest and more useful version of this conversation.

The Data Behind What Maluma Is Describing Is Largely a Latina Story

Research consistently shows that Latinas carry a disproportionate burden of mental health conditions, driven by the pressure of societal and familial expectations that leave very little room for struggle. According to the American Psychiatric Association, Latina women face elevated rates of depression, anxiety and disordered eating compared to their non-Latina white peers, and they are significantly less likely to seek or receive treatment. The cultural architecture around what women in our community are expected to absorb silently is real, it is documented and it has consequences.

Eating disorders in particular are chronically underdiagnosed in Latinas, in part because the clinical image of who gets eating disorders has historically looked nothing like us. The National Eating Disorders Association has noted that Latino communities are less likely to be asked about eating disorder symptoms by healthcare providers and less likely to seek treatment even when symptoms are present. The silence is not personal weakness. It is the product of a culture that has long told us to normalize the pain and keep moving.

Standing With Maluma Means Standing With Ourselves

The reflex in Latino culture when someone reveals this kind of vulnerability is sometimes to look at them with pity, to treat the disclosure as something to manage or minimize rather than something to honor. Maluma does not need that response and neither do we. He is not asking to be seen as broken. He is asking to be seen, which is a different thing entirely, and he is doing it in a space where men in our community are rarely given permission to do so.

Collectively, we are a community that processes an enormous amount, and when the pressure of managing that weight becomes too great, unhealthy coping mechanisms fill the space that honest conversation could occupy instead. Maluma chose the conversation. He chose it publicly, at one of the most visible events in the Latin music industry, and he did it while being one of the biggest Colombian artists alive. That is not a small thing to do.

We are all somewhere on a healing journey, and there is something specific about moving through it alongside your own people, in your own language, with someone who knows what the pressure actually feels like. Maluma opened that door this week. The least we can do is walk through it with him.