Taylor Swift has opened up about her personal battle with an eating disorder. She spoke to Variety about her struggle to overcome the problem.
The revelations are one of the subjects discussed in her documentary Miss Americana, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night.
Swift admitted that she used to “just stop eating” if she saw a picture of herself she thought was unflattering, or if she heard or read a hurtful comment about her appearance.
Speaking to Variety, she recalls the occasion when she was 18-years-old and appeared on the cover of a magazine for the first time.
The headline on the cover read, “Pregnant at 18?” She said it was because she “had worn something that made my lower stomach look not flat.”
Swift went on to say that she mentally registered the headline as a “punishment.”
She then spoke about how she would receive praise at photoshoots. These two conflicting scenarios caused her to view life as a cycle of punishment and praise.
“You register that enough times, and you just start to accommodate everything towards praise and punishment, including your own body.”
In Miss Americana, she iterates, “It’s not good for me to see pictures of myself every day” because she would see a photo and think her stomach looked too big or someone would wonder if she was pregnant.
This would act as her trigger to “starve a little bit – to stop eating.”
She admitted that she struggled most around the time of her 1989 album, which was released in 2014.
She confessed to often feeling like she was “going to pass out” while on stage due to weakness because of under-eating.
Nowadays, the Grammy award-winning star is no longer unhealthily skinny and claims she doesn’t care about the nasty comments anymore.
“Now I realize… if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel enervated.” She has also accepted, “the fact that I’m a size six instead of a size double-zero.”
The Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana is available on Netflix from January 31st.