Taylor Swift Speaks Out About Past Battles With Eating Disorder

Taylor Swift is opening up about struggling with an eating disorder.

The “You Need to Calm Down” singer chatted about her battle as well as her journey of overcoming it in her upcoming Netflix doc Miss Americana, which she debuted at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

In the film, Taylor admitted that in the past, 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 didn’t know if I was going to feel comfortable with talking about body image and talking about the stuff I’ve gone through in terms of how unhealthy that’s been for me — my relationship with food and all that over the years,” Taylor Swift told Variety about the doc. “But the way that Lana (Wilson, the film’s director) tells the story, it really makes sense. I’m not as articulate as I should be about this topic because there are so many people who could talk about it in a better way. But all I know is my own experience. And my relationship with food was exactly the same psychology that I applied to everything else in my life: 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.”

Click inside to hear what else she had to say…

“I remember how, when I was 18, that was the first time I was on the cover of a magazine,” Taylor continued. “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 photo shoot 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. You register that enough times, and you just start to accommodate everything towards praise and punishment, including your own body.”

“I think I’ve never really wanted to talk about that before, and I’m pretty uncomfortable talking about it now,” she added. “But in the context of every other thing that I was doing or not doing in my life, I think it makes sense [to have it in the film].”

“I thought that I was supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it,” Taylor says 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).”

Taylor also said that she has come to terms with “the fact that I’m a size 6 instead of a size double-zero” and that whenever people were worried about her in her double-zero days, she would reply, “‘What are you talking about? Of course I eat. …. I exercise a lot.’ And I did exercise a lot. But I wasn’t eating.”

“If you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that ass that everybody wants,” Taylor says in the doc. “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.” She added that she would “go into a real shame/hate spiral.”

“I was watching a Netflix Brené Brown special on shame, because I read a lot of her books, because I have dealings with shame every once in awhile,” Taylor told Variety. “She was saying something like, ‘It’s ridiculous to say “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me,” because that’s not possible. But you can decide whose opinions matter more and whose opinions you put more weight on.’ And I think that is really part of growing up, if you’re going to do it right. That’s part of hoping to find some sort of maturity and balance in your life.”

“I don’t expect anyone with a pop career to learn how to do that within the first 10 years,” Taylor Swift shared. “And I know that there’s a lot of bad stuff that’s gone on recently, a lot of really hard stuff my family is going through, and a lot of opposition and feeling pressure or suppression of one kind or another. But I am actually really happy. Because I pick and choose now, for the most part, what I care deeply about. And I think that’s made a huge difference.”