Taylor Swift Opens Up About Struggling With Eating Disorder

2020 Sundance Film Festival - "Taylor Swift: Miss Americana" Premiere

Taylor Swift is speaking out about how she overcame an eating disorder.

The “You Need to Calm Down” singer opened up about her private struggles with food and the “trigger” that led her to starve herself in her Miss Americana documentary, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival last night (January 23).

As Swift explained in the film, whenever she’d see “a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big, or… someone said that I looked pregnant … and that’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit — just stop eating.”

“I thought that I was supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of the show, or in the middle of it,” Swift reveals in the documentary. “Now, I realize, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel [enervated].”

Swift went on to describe her unhealthy relationship with food over the years, telling Variety, “If I was given a pat on the head, I registered that as good. If I was given a punishment, I registered that as bad.” The 30-year-old remembered thinking this way after appearing on her first magazine cover at 18, recalling the headline that suggested she was pregnant and registering that memory as “a punishment” for wearing an outfit that “made my lower stomach look not flat.”

Elsewhere in the doc, the "Delicate" songbird reveals the lengths she would go to stay thin and how she’s since come to embrace “the fact that I’m a size 6 instead of a size double-zero.” Back then, whenever people expressed concern, Swift would tell people she ate and exercised, but admits, “I wasn’t eating." As she explains in the doc: "If you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that ass that everybody wants. But if you have enough weight on you to have an a—, your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just f—ing impossible.”

Swift said the conflict she felt with her body sometimes sent her “into a real shame/hate spiral,” but with the teachings of self-help author Brene Brown, she says she's been able to restore balance to her life.

Photo: Getty Images


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