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Demi Lovato started off her year by performing at the Grammys, where she debuted a new song, “Anyone,” and then sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. She also recently posted a photo of a tattoo of doves and an angel she got in December to commemorate her spiritual awakening.
Demi is talking more about her health, too. She recently sat down with new mom Ashley Graham for Ashley’s Pretty Big Deal podcast, and talked about the connection between her eating disorder and her overdose:
Speaking with Ashley Graham on the model’s Pretty Big Deal podcast, Lovato, 27, said that she’s trying to take a new approach to her career after “running myself into the ground with workouts and extreme dieting.”
Lovato explained that she had “thought the past few years was recovery from an eating disorder, when it actually was just completely falling into it.”
The difference, she said, was that while her eating disorder symptoms were more visible in the past when she would binge and purge her food, “they weren’t as obvious” when she said she was in recovery — they just took on a different form in over exercising.
“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,” Lovato said. “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.”
Lovato said that she was still being pushed to maintain a certain body type, and that led to her overdose in July 2018.
Demi's comment about thinking that she was recovering from her eating disorder and then realizing that she was "completely falling into it" remind me of what Aly Raisman said about her experience of recovering from trauma: “Some days I feel like I am moving forward and then the next day it feels like 3 steps back. Sometimes when I feel like I am beginning to heal from one part of my trauma, another memory pops up.” It’s incredibly frustrating to realize, as Demi did, that what you thought was a step in recovery actually wasn’t, and was harmful. However, the fact that Demi realized that obsessively exercising (to the point that she was taking meetings at her gym!), was actually a manifestation of her eating disorder is really important, because it enabled her to stop, step back, and realize that she was continuing to harm herself. I hope that she’s proud of herself, because that’s not an easy to thing to do.
Demi told Ashley that for her next album, she’s “not going to worry about” what she looks like. I hope that she continues to recover, and that she now has more people around her who are aware of the fact that her eating disorder might not present in the ways that they would typically expect. I also hope that she’s able to stay in this new mindset of being more accepting of her body and not worry about whether she “fits a certain mold.” Good for her for changing her thinking, of course, but that can be so hard to put into practice.
Here’s that interview:
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