Taylor Swift, 30, has always been known for her tall, trim body. But it came with a price, as she’s now revealing she developed an eating disorder over both praise and punishment about how her figure appeared. “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,” she tells our sister site Variety, ahead of the release of her Netflix documentary, Miss Americana.
“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,” Taylor explains.
“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,” Taylor reveals.
“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,” she continues.
“I think I’ve never really wanted to talk about that before, and I’m pretty uncomfortable talking about it now,” she tells Variety. “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, she says. In the documentary, it shows pics of how thin Taylor had become in her 2014-15 1989 era, versus her trim but healthier look by the time she was on her 2018 Reputation tour.
Variety reports that in the film, Taylor reveals, “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. Now I realize, no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger, you can do all these shows and not feel (enervated).” She also says that she’s okay with “the fact that I’m a size 6 instead of a size double-zero.” During her thin double-zero 1989 days, she didn’t think there was anything wrong with her figure. If anyone expressed concern about it, she would tell them, “‘What are you talking about? Of course I eat….I exercise a lot.’ And I did exercise a lot. But I wasn’t eating.”