14 DAY TRIAL // Janet Jackson, who has weighed a very public battle against the extra pounds for the largest part of her adult life, has finally come to a place in her life where she has a very healthy body image, has embraced her curves and is no longer lacking confidence. Of course, it wasn’t always like that, the star says for the August 2010 issue of Essence magazine (story via MusicRooms) – and she can pinpoint exactly when her problems began.
Janet, as fans must know, starred as Penny Woods in the sitcom “Good Times,” between the ages 11 and 13. While on the show, she started to grow, which, as she puts it, the producers would not allow in front of the camera. Consequently, she was forced to wear tape across her chest to look flatter than she was in real life, which understandably led her to believe that there was something wrong with her body if she had to go through all this trouble to look different. It wasn’t just recently that she recovered from that, Janet explains.
“When I was doing Good Times they wanted me to bind my chest. I started developing at a young age. They didn’t tell me that they were going to do this. They just did it as I was getting dressed for the first show. So under the little sweatshirt, that Band-Aid is wrapped around my chest to make me look flatter. That plays tricks here [she points to her head]. You’re an innocent kid and you immediately start thinking how you look naturally isn’t good enough. It really affected me, up until now,” Janet reveals for the publication.
She recently learned that, before anything else, it’s how she feels about herself that really matters. In fact, that’s precisely the message she’s trying to send to women all over the world who may be interested in buying her book, “True You.” “There comes a time when you don’t give [a damn] what people say or think. You just do your thing because it’s finally about you and not in a selfish way but in a great way,” Janet says.
In the same interview, the singer also goes into some details regarding her romance with businessman Wissam Al Mana, who is ten years her junior, for which reason she had to take some criticism in the media. For her, age is but a number and she’s not about to let the rest of the world tell her otherwise, Janet says.
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