In her documentary Dancing with the Devil, Demi Lovato talks about how along with substance abuse problems she also had an eating disorder. There are only two of the six episodes up right now, so she hasn’t gone in-depth about her eating disorder yet, but we got to see a little bit about it in what was covered in the unaired 2018 documentary.
She briefly talked about how, when she was little she was enrolled in beauty pageants, and if anyone is familiar with that culture knows that if you already have any kind of body image issues, this only serves the purpose of driving them home.
Did beauty pageant culture contribute to Demi Lovato’s eating disorder?
Demi describes the environent as really controlling. If you study eating disorders at any length you will know that they thrive when there is strict control, Sometimes when the unfortunate victim of an eating disorder is triggered, it’s when they are in an environment where they have no control over anything, so they decide to try and control the one thing that they can, and that is food intake.
Beauty Pageant culture doesn’t help this by driving home the point that unless you are thin, you don’t win the prize, no matter how talented you are, the industry is still very much focused on one’s looks.
And one could argue the same about Hollywood. There was a long ago rumor that certain actresses are paid not to eat. Jeanette McCurdy talks about how at the teen choice awards people would openly judge you if you got anything off of the craft services table except for maybe some fruit.
Demi previously talked about in an interview on the Ellen show where before now she didn’t realize that people would put snacks in your dressing room if asked, apparently her former management team was so controlling that Demi couldn’t even have snacks in her dressing room when she went on interviews.
Forget special occassions too, especially her birthday, she said for years that she just had a watermelon cake where you would make a cake out of watermelon slices and then put whipped cream on it as icing. She said that this past birthday was the best because she has a brand new team now, a team that lets her have an actual birthday cake.
She said that she was moved to tears beause for once she didn’t have to think about sugar intake, she could just enjoy a birthday cake like a normal person on her birthday. Did beauty pageant culture contribute to Lovato’s eating disorder? We’ll probably find out in the later episodes, but for now we can definitely say that it didn’t help matters. Stay tuned!!!
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