For six years, Alexa PenaVega silently struggled with bulimia.

But thanks to the confidence she found while competing on season 21 of Dancing with the Stars, the former Spy Kids star, 27, found the strength to go public with her story.

"The one thing that I had always wanted was for someone to be real with me about that whole situation," PenaVega told PEOPLE after Monday's show of her battle with bulimia, which started in childhood after she was told by a movie producer that she was too fat.

"You read textbooks and it's just so, well, textbook. 'This is how you get over bulimia.' But it is so much deeper than that," she continued. "I wish I'd had somebody who could have told me, 'It's scary.' You struggle giving it up. You want to get rid of it but you struggle because, in a strange way, you enjoy it."