Demi Lovato has recently revealed that trying to recover from her long-term eating disorder had taken a toll on her mental health, which triggered her drug overdose.
The 27-year-old singer told Ashley Graham on Pretty Big Deal that she is trying to take a new approach to her career after running herself into the ground with “workouts and extreme dieting.”
Lovato said she had “thought the past few years was recovery from an eating disorder when it actually was just completely falling into it.”
She said, “When you don’t have people that know the signs around you … like, what I think I really needed was someone to come in and saying like, ‘Hey, I think you need to look into how much you’re working out,’ like, maybe three times a day is excessive for working out.”
“Like, there were days when I lived at the gym, and I would take business meetings at the gym on my breaks from my workouts. And I’d be gross, but at least I didn’t have to leave and shower and I could go right back into my workout. I’d eat a meal, go workout, eat a meal, go workout. And it’s like, that’s just not happiness to me, that’s not freedom,” she added.
Lovato said she was being pushed to maintain a certain body type, which led to her drug overdose in July 2018.
“When you have certain people around you that are telling you certain things, that you should look a certain way, it makes it harder. So I was in that situation — I was just running myself into the ground, and I honestly think that’s kind of what led to everything happening over the past year,” the Heart Attack singer said.
“It was just me thinking I found recovery when I didn’t and then living this kind of lie, and trying to tell the world that I was happy with myself when I really wasn’t,” she continued.
Lovato explained that now her mindset has changed and she has plans to make her career more body positive.
“I made a choice going into this next album, okay when I present this, I’m not going to worry about what I look like. I’m not going to worry about trying to look a certain way or fit a certain mold or whatever, that’s just not who I am,” Lovato said.
“Someone needs to stand up for people who don’t naturally look that way. Like I had to work my ass off every day at the gym six days a week to maintain that figure, and it’s just like, that led me only one way, and I don’t want to go down that path again. So I’m not willing to destroy my mental health to look a certain way anymore.”
