"Stumble" star Jenn Lyon reflects on her journey to self-acceptance.
Jenn Lyon as Courteney Potter in NBC's "Stumble" longs to be the winningest cheer coach.

Starring in NBC’s new half-hour sitcom “Stumble,” a mockumentary about the world of competitive college cheerleading, feels like the top of the pyramid for Jenn Lyon.

In the series, premiering Nov. 7 (8:30 ET/PT), Lyon portrays Coach Courteney Potter, inspired by Monica Aldama, who delivered tough love in a Texas accent and championship wins for Navarro College, as seen in Netflix’s docuseries “Cheer” (2020-2022). Aldama, who retired in 2023, is an executive producer.

“I steal from the best, and she's the GOAT,” says Lyon. “I'm so lucky to have gotten to watch her and borrow some of her personal vocabulary of movement, but even more than the way she moves, I model the way she cares for the kids.”

After being fired for drinking with her elite cheer team, Courteney is forced to find a job at another junior college and build a team from scratch to achieve her dream of becoming the coach with the most wins. Lyon assesses her character is “a little more resilient” than she is, but the actress has privately overcome her share of challenges.

“I've been kicking it in this business for 20 years,” says the veteran performer, most recently seen on Netflix's "Sirens." "It's a lot of nos − mostly nos. So you got to stick in there.”

Behind the scenes, Lyon has also been in recovery from anorexia and bulimia for 10 years.

“I had been on diets most of my life because I was a heavy kid, but [around 15] was the first time I was ever really able to starve myself enough to really lose weight,” reveals Lyon. “I gained and lost the same 80 pounds over and over, and I didn't go to treatment. I was anorexic, and then I would binge eat, and then finally I was a bulimic.”

“We all want to be loved and accepted for who we are, and if we can't get that, then we'll just sand off any rough edge,” Lyon says. “I was always trying to sand away the parts of myself that were too sensitive, too loud, needed too much.”

And unfortunately, weighing less increased her acting opportunities.

“I just didn't book stuff until I got real small,” she says. “I could do theater and stuff, but nobody wanted me bigger. Then I got real small, and I booked ‘Justified.’" She appeared on the acclaimed FX show from 2012-2013. "It was like I had dieted myself into a love interest.”

After “Fish in the Dark,” a Broadway play written and starring Larry David, wrapped in 2015, Lyon sought treatment. At the time, a therapist told the actress, "'You're circling the drain, you're really drowning,'” she recalls.

At the Renfrew Center, a facility that treats eating disorders with locations throughout the eastern United States, Lyon learned to “sit with the terrible feelings that come with eating food and keeping it in your body and eating all the scariest foods,” she says. “I remember I was undone by croutons on a salad, or we'd walk into breakfast and there would be donuts on the plate.” The sight of them made Lyon feel “like I was coming unraveled and untethered from the earth. And I look back on it now, I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, it's a donut. Who cares?’ But it really was the scariest thing to try to eat food and then know I was going to keep it [down].”

“It's about your value,” she explains. And control. Food “becomes a way to deal with your emotions. Not only are you restrictive with food, you are restricting your feelings. You're not saying how you feel, you're swallowing everything. You're just taking up less space in every way." At Renfrew, when she had to start gaining weight, "it was like I finally had to deal with how sad or how angry, or how scared I really was.”

Lyon says she gained 70 pounds in treatment and feared that’d be the end of her career. A month after leaving Renfrew, she booked TNT’s nail salon dramedy “Claws.”

“I immediately was so scared because on the page it said that [her character] was like skinny in a tube top, scrappy, whatever,” Lyon says. “And here I was, as curvy as I'd ever been, and I remember going back on my promises of rehab, and I was like, ‘I'll lose weight for the role. I can do it.’ And [creator] Eliot Laurence looked right in my face and said, ‘Oh honey, this is more of a muffin-top kind of show.’ I felt such a relief because I was like, ‘Oh, I can eat food and be on TV,’ and that was such a blessing.”

Lyon now knows that her value cannot be measured by a scale.

“First of all, I have an intrinsic value that isn't based on doing anything,” she says. “But I think I feel more self-esteem when I do esteemable acts, when I am of service, when I'm kind, when I am well-read when I am present in my work, when I'm prepared. That to me, feels so much better than any number on a scale.”

And that is something to cheer about.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How 'Stumble' star Jenn Lyon, once 'undone by croutons,' triumphed over eating disorders

Reporting by Erin Jensen, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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