Taylor Swift has opened up for the first time publicly about her experience with an eating disorder.
In scenes from her documentary, Miss Americana, which made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night, Taylor revealed that she would often restrict her eating to the point of feeling she was about to pass out on stage.
She said: “I thought I was supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it. Now I realise, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel enervated.”
The American standard of beauty
Taylor, 30, went on to say that she’s felt under constant pressure to meet a “fucking impossible” standard of beauty throughout her career.
She explained: “There’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting. Because, 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, then your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just fucking impossible.”
She also revealed that when her eating disorder was at its worst; she would make lists of everything she ate, exercised constantly, and routinely “wasn’t eating.”
“I would have defended it to anybody who said, ‘I’m concerned about you,'” she went on. She went on to admit that her response to concern was: “‘What are you talking about? Of course I eat. I exercise a lot.’ And I did exercise a lot. But I wasn’t eating.”
And while Taylor now accepts she’s “no longer a size double 0” and fights the urge to be critical about her body. She still avoids looking at photos of herself in case it’s triggering.
She said: “It’s better to think you look fat than to look sick. I tend to get triggered by something; whether it’s a picture of me where I feel like my tummy looked too big. Or someone said that I looked pregnant or something. And that will trigger me to just starve a little bit, just stop eating.”
How it began…
Taylor Swift elaborated further on her eating disorder during an interview with Variety in conjunction with the documentary’s release. She recalled the formative moment that affected her body image for a decade.
“I remember when I was 18,” she said, “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 wore something that made my lower stomach look not flat.”
“So I just registered that as a punishment,” she continued. “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!’ And I looked at that as a pat on the head.”
She added: “You register that enough times. And you just start to accommodate everything towards praise and punishment, including your own body.”
Back in December, Taylor hinted at what was to come in the documentary. This was by opening up for the first time about how she used food as a way of “exerting control” during her twenties.
Speaking to Vogue, Taylor said: “I now can really recognise and diagnose toxic messages being sent to me by society, by culture, about my body.”
“I’m a woman, I’m not a coat hanger,” she continued. “I need to feel healthy in my life. And I need to take pleasure in food. I need to not use my body as an exercise of control when I feel out of control in my life.”
Congratulations on bettering your health, Taylor!