Jesy Nelson Reveals The Breaking Point That Led To Her Little Mix Departure

Jesy Nelson is opening up about her exit from Little Mix!

The 29-year-old singer shared what was the final straw for her departure in a new interview.

Jesy opened up in the new issue of Cosmopolitan UK, where she takes the cover, and reveals that comparing herself to other girls and worrying what she looked like is what led to her leaving the band.

Click inside to see what she said…

“The last music video we did ['Sweet Melody'] was the breaking point. We’d been in lockdown, and [that had been] the first time I could have a break and be at home around people that I love. It was the happiest I’d ever felt, and I didn’t realize that until I went back to work,” Jesy said.

“I immediately became a different person. I had anxiety. Whenever we had a music video, I put an enormous amount of pressure on myself to try and lose weight. I have a fear of looking back on the camera. If I don’t like what I see, I find it so hard to be in front of the camera and feel amazing and perform,” she continued.

“I’d been in lockdown, and I’d put on a bit of weight but I didn’t care. And [then] they said, ‘You’ve got a music video in a couple of weeks,’ and I just panicked. I went on this extreme diet, with bloody shakes, and tried to eat as little as possible,” Jesy shared. “On the day of the ‘Sweet Melody’ video I had a panic attack on set because I didn’t look how I wanted to look and I found it so hard to just be happy and enjoy myself. I looked at the other three and they were having the time of their life.”

“I get so jealous, because I want to feel like that and enjoy it, because music is my passion. To have this dream and not be enjoying it because of what I look like, I knew wasn’t normal,” she said.

“There’s a scene in ‘Sweet Melody’ I’m not in, because that’s when I had a panic attack and broke down. I was like, ‘I just want to go home.’ I was sobbing in the dressing room. Someone really close to me said, ‘This has got to stop. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’re going to end up where you were before,’” she added.

“For me, that was the pinnacle point. I was like, ‘I need to start taking care of myself now, because this isn’t health.’ It wasn’t nice for the other three to be around someone who didn’t want to be there,” she went on. “So I took a break. I went through a really dark time after the music video. My mum said, ‘This has got to stop now. I have seen you suffer too much. This has been 10 years of your life.’”

“For so long, I worried about others and letting people down. The only person I should have been trying to make happy was myself, and I wasn’t doing that. I needed to do it for my mental health, because I know I would have ended up back where I was five years ago, and that’s scary.”

If you missed it, Jesy has been in the studio working on new solo music!