Taylor Swift’s documentary “Miss Americana” debuted at Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night, and in it she reveals that she has struggled with an eating disorder.
“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 ass, your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just f—ing impossible.”
During her 2015 world tour, under-eating left her feeling “like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it,” Swift said.
In the film she says she would “starve a little bit [and] just stop eating”.
“It’s not good for me to see pictures of myself every day,” said the singer. “It’s only happened a few times, and I’m not in any way proud of it, [but I’ll 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.”
In an interview with Variety, she revealed more about when she began to feel insecure about her body.
“I remember how, when I was 18, that was the first time I was on the cover of a magazine, and the headline was like ‘Pregnant at 18?’ And it was because I had worn something that made my lower stomach look not flat. So I just registered that as a punishment.
“And then I’d walk into a photoshoot and be in the dressing room and somebody who worked at a magazine would say, ‘Oh, wow, this is so amazing that you can fit into the sample sizes. Usually, we have to make alterations to the dresses, but we can take them right off the runway and put them on you!’” she continued. “And I looked at that as a pat on the head. You register that enough times, and you just start to accommodate everything towards praise and punishment, including your own body.”