14 DAY TRIAL // Alanis Morissette never made a secret of her wilder years or of the fact that she developed eating disorders and depression because of them. Now 41, the singer has spoken to Women’s Health about her continuous struggle not to fall in the same destructive patterns as before, and how yoga and meditation are helping her.
She’s so “chill” that you wouldn’t even recognize her for the wild child she was in 1995, the publication writes. She even has her own dedicated room in her house, where she retires to meditate and get alternative treatments to keep her balanced.
Eating disorders are a continuous struggle
Alanis came clean about her past, including battling anorexia and bulimia, many years ago. She is struggling to this day, in the sense that she needs all the help she can get to stay on the straight and narrow.
She is very mindful of her body and she makes an exercise of will to stay “inside” her body, she explains to the magazine. Meditation, aromatherapy and yoga do the rest.
“The big question for me around eating-disorder recovery is, ‘What is sobriety with food?”,” she explains. With drugs and alcohol, you know that to stay sober, you have to remove yourself from the path of temptation: stay away from bars, don’t mingle with people who do drugs or have access to them, and you’re more or less safe.
But what do you do when your relationship with food is damaged?
“Whereas with food, you have to eat, so how can one go from, in my case, bingeing and purging, starving, overeating, the scale going up and down - how can I go from that to a ‘sober’ approach?” she asks.
The answer is: by building boundaries and staying inside her body.
Raising awareness on mental health issues
This isn’t the first time that Alanis goes public with her story with eating disorders to raise awareness on them. In the past, she’s done countless interviews on the topic and took part in a variety of events to bring more attention to the importance of spotting the signs of an eating disorder and providing the appropriate treatment.
She’s also been very outspoken on other mental health issues, coming clean about her own bout with depression. For example, she found that running helped her keep it at bay, and she recommended others suffering from it trying out her method.
Alanis Morissette is also an author: “Eat to Live” is a book on how going vegan helped her break the unhealthy relationship she had with food.