Story at a glance
- Singer and actress Demi Lovato has been vocal about having an eating disorder and her struggles to manage it.
- Research shows beauty ideals perpetuated in the media can negatively affect body image and even lead to dysmorphia and eating disorders.
- Girls and young women are especially at risk for developing eating disorders.
There’s a moment in Demi Lovato’s new docuseries, “Dancing with the Devil,” where the singer points to a pile of costume sketches for an upcoming show.
“Part of the problem is the sketches that they f***ing draw. Everything looks good on a sketch because it’s a 10 foot 90 pound model with a 5 inch waist,” says the singer. “There’s just so much pressure as a female in the industry to look a certain way and to dress a certain way and that s*** is the stuff that I used to look up to. That’s just really triggering.”
The first two episodes of the series premiered on Tuesday, ahead of the artist’s upcoming album release, and delved right into her struggles with mental health — including relapsing into eating disorders.
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“It wasn’t until the last few years that I really fully realized the impact that eating disorders have had on her. We had to be very careful what we ate around her, which sounds insane,” said friend and actor Matthew Scott Montgomery, recalling her birthday celebrations, where she was given a watermelon with fat-free whipped cream on top, rather than a cake.
This isn’t the first time Lovato has spoken publicly about body image and eating disorders; in her 2017 documentary film “Simply Complicated,” she talked about her battles with anorexia, binge eating and bulimia as well as other forms of self-harm and self-medication. But her honesty about relapsing after obsessive dieting and exercising reveals an unfortunate and often unspoken reality of the condition: It’s hard to overcome.
“I had people around me that were really policing my food intake and the things that I was eating, so I was miserable and I snapped,” she said.
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Just as traditional media can contribute to the development of eating disorders, research shows that the Internet and social media are associated with heightened body image and eating concerns, especially in adolescents. Lovato, who began acting on “Barney & Friends” at 7 and participated in beauty pageants when she was younger, developed eating disorders as a teenager in the public eye.
She isn’t the first or the only woman to speak out about the fatphobic beauty standards in the entertainment industry — her peers Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and others have all spoken out against body shaming — but the standard persists. The explosion of social media includes algorithms that discriminate against fat bodies, even as the beauty standard evolves to be seemingly more inclusive. Still, Lovato told the Washington Post, there is solidarity among those in the spotlight with her.
“Women are really coming together to support one another and lift each other up,” she told the Washington Post. “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had on [direct message] or texting with another female artist … them confiding in me, or me confiding in them, and just being there for one another.”
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