14 DAY TRIAL // As announced a while back, Demi Lovato has taped an interview with Robin Roberts for ABC’s Good Morning America. Bits and pieces from it are already available and, among other things, Demi also reveals she’s been a cutter for most of her life.
Speculation about whether she was harming herself has been around for years, but Demi never addressed them personally.
Now that she’s gotten treatment for a wide range of issues, including eating disorders (she’s had both anorexia and bulimia at one point) and low self-esteem, the Disney star can speak up, in the hope that others will learn from her mistakes.
Lovato began cutting herself when she was just 11, after developing bulimia at the tender age of 8 as a result of bullying, she reveals.
Knowing that she’s only 18 makes the revelation all the more startling.
“I developed an eating disorder, and that’s kind of what I’ve been dealing with ever since,” Demi says. She was bullied in school for being “fat” and that ruined her self esteem.
“I was compulsively overeating when I was eight years old. So, I guess, for the past 10 years I’ve had a really unhealthy relationship with food,” the star reveals.
By the time she was 11, she’d already found a way to deal with the problems, or what she thought was a way: she was cutting herself.
“It was a way of expressing my own shame, of myself, on my own body. I was matching the inside to the outside,” Lovato tells Roberts.
“And there were some times where my emotions were just so built up, I didn’t know what to do. The only way that I could get instant gratification was through an immediate release on myself,” she adds.
Last year, when she went on the road with the Jonas Brothers, she was doing concerts without eating for a long time, self-medicating and having really serious issues with keeping her temper in check, she admits.
Eventually, she could no longer keep the situation under control and everything blew up when she attacked one of her backup dancers and friends, Shorty, for which she takes “full responsibility.”
Now, Demi is lending her voice and her painful experience to a cause: she wants to help teens in similar situations realize they’re not alone and, most importantly, that they should ask for help.
Below is a preview of the full interview.
