Kesha used to feel "ashamed" whenever she ate food.
Kesha
The 31-year-old singer has admitted that in her early years of fame, she believed she "wasn't supposed to eat" so that she could "be a certain size", and subsequently suffered from an eating disorder which would make her "throw up" whenever she ate something which made her feel guilty.
She said: "I really just thought I wasn't supposed to eat food. And then if I ever did, I felt very ashamed, and I would make myself throw up because I'd think, 'Oh, my God, I can't believe I actually did that horrible thing. I'm so ashamed of myself because I don't deserve to eat food.'
"I was slowly, slowly starving myself. And the worse I got and the sicker I got, the better a lot of people around me were saying that I looked. They would just be like, 'Oh, my gosh, keep doing whatever you're doing! You look so beautiful, so stunning.'"
The 'Praying' singer eventually reached a breaking point when she found herself trying to pretend that she'd eaten whilst at a family meal.
She added: "I was like, 'Oh, my God, what if they walk outside and see this food in a bush? Or they see it in the garbage can?' And I just had all this mounting anxiety. And then finally I was like, 'F**k. This. S**t. F**k this s**t. I'm hungry!' And I am so anxious that I feel like I'm going to explode from all the secrets. All the secret times I'm pretending to eat or other times I'm purging, and I'm trying to not let anybody know. And I'm just f***ing sick of this s**t. And I remember just shaking because I was so fed up, so anxious, and I was just mad that I had let myself get to that point."
During her recovery, the 'Tik Tok' hitmaker remembers "crying into a carbohydrate" because she still believed the food would make her "fat".
She said: "I didn't know how to even eat. At that point, I'd forgotten how to do it. I just remember crying into a carbohydrate, being like, 'I can't eat it. It's going to make me fat, and if I'm fat, I can't be a singer because pop stars can't eat food - they can't be fat.'"
Kesha's insecurities continued even after she had begun eating again, but she admits she began to realise how important her health was after an unnamed friend called her shortly after he won several Grammy awards.
Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, Kesha recalled: "He was like, 'Congratulations to you,' and I was like, 'For what?' And he was like, 'Who cares about my Grammys? You just saved your f***ing life.' And I just was blown away by that, because it made me look at the whole thing totally differently.
"[I realised] 'Oh, wait.' I did just take my life into my own hands and choose life over a slow, painful, shameful self-imposed death. And I need to stop just being so f***ing mean to myself."
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