Alexa PenaVega may have left the ballroom on Monday night, but she left a lasting impression.
Dancing With the Stars said goodbye to one half of its beloved married couple on Monday night, with a devastated Alexa being eliminated after landing in the bottom two with husband Carlos PenaVega. And the Spy Kids star was sent home on her best night of the competition, earning two perfect scores. But it was her first performance, an emotional dance set to "Make It Rain," which represented a battle she's kept secret from the public for a long time: a six-year struggle with an eating disorder.
During the package before her performance, Alexa told her partner Mark Ballas a story about working on a film when she was younger, where "the producers kept telling me, 'You're too fat.'" That experience led Alexa to develop an eating disorder for the next six years. "I struggled with bulimia for so long," she said. "And even though I got through it, I feel like a lot of my insecurities from my body are from that."
It was an honest and emotional moment, one that truly highlighted what makes Dancing With the Stars so special...and why Alexa and Carlos wanted to do the show.
"It's so crazy because when Carlos and I joined the show, like one, it was a journey together," Alexa told E! News' Sibley Scoles after her elimination. "But more than anything we just kept saying, if we could just be a light for people, shine a light on marriage, shine a light on life...I feel like there's so many things out there that are so negative. This is the one show where you can show something so positive and have fun and show a journey. If we could do that, that was our main goal, and I really felt like we did that, especially tonight."
For Mark, who choreographed the routine in which he represented Alexa's eating disorder attempting to pull her back in, the experience was "incredible...I think with issues like that, people usually don't like to address them. With issues like that, you have to be bold, you have to have courage and you have to put it out there...as long as we can help one person, that's all that matters. Tonight's dance was bigger than the show. It was about a bigger message...to help people and to inspire."
To hear more from Alexa and Mark, including her message for Carlos, watch our exclusive interview with the pair above.
DWTS airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on ABC.