Taylor Swift: I starved myself after rumours of pregnancy
Star reveals eating disorder that left her feeling as if she would pass out during concerts in documentary
TAYLOR SWIFT has revealed she used to starve herself to the point of almost passing out during performances, opening up about her struggles with an eating disorder in a documentary.
Swift traces some of her problems with food to an incident as a teenager when a magazine speculated on whether she was pregnant because of her weight.
She says her problem was exacerbated when photographers then praised her for losing weight.
The 30-year-old pop star addresses her past “unhealthy” relationship with food in Miss Americana, a Netflix documentary, which had its world premiere
‘Now I realise if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel enervated’
at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on Thursday. Swift says that she reached a low point during the promotion for her album 1989, which came out in 2014.
The documentary features photographs of Swift during that tour, when she says she was severely undereating, and compares them with images from her 2018 tour when she was a healthier weight.
“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,” Swift says in the film.
“Now I realise, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel [enervated].”
Swift used a recent interview to explain her initial reluctance to speak out on the topic and what she looks back on as some of the triggers for her habits. She told Variety, the US entertainment trade magazine: “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.
“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.”
She added: “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!’ 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.”
Swift said she “never really wanted to talk about that before” and admitted the topic still makes her “pretty uncomfortable”.
Swift, who gives a voiceover for the film, said that she had accepted she was no longer a “size double-zero”, which is a UK size two, and that she now has a better relationship with food.