On Thursday night (Jan 23), the new Netflix documentary Miss Americana premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
The documentary follows the behind-the-scenes life of country singer-turned-pop star Taylor Swift. It will be available to stream on Netflix and will be in select theaters on January 31.
People weren’t so sure what to expect from the documentary, since Swift seems to have been an open book the last year or so. But as the documentary aired at Sundance, everyone learned that even the world’s biggest pop star has secrets – and now she’s ready for the world to know them.
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Swift reveals in Miss Americana that she previously suffered from an eating disorder.
You may remember that the “Lover” singer was pretty much MIA for an entire year and that was because she says “it’s not good for me to see pictures of myself every day.”
In the past, she says that when she has seen “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.”
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She told Variety, “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…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.”
The first time she remembers a tabloid criticizing her body was when she was just 18. She wore an outfit that wasn’t skin tight on her stomach and magazine headlines said “Pregnant at 18.”
Other times she would be “rewarded” for her frame was during photo shoots where people would be so happy she could fit into sample sizes and no alterations were needed. She wanted to stay at that size, which sometimes meant not eating.
She realized that under-eating would affect her stamina on tour.
“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,” she 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).”
She’s at a much healthier place with her weight and image of herself these days and isn’t afraid of what tabloids say about her weight anymore.
Check out the trailer for Miss Americana below.