Demi Moore Was Mortified When a Director Told Her She Needed To Lose Weight: ‘I Felt Mortification and Raw Panic’
Demi Moore will never forget the moment when a director told her that she needed to lose weight. After his comment, the actor became obsessed with the number on the scale and developed an unhealthy relationship with food. Moore began to over-exercise to the point where it became an addiction. But what exactly did the director say that caused her to have these body image issues?
Demi Moore admits that she used to have a terrible relationship with food
Once Hollywood began to scrutinize Moore’s appearance, she developed an extremely unhealthy relationship with food. The Ghost actor says it got so bad that she eventually locked her refrigerator shut.
“All of my anxieties shifted to food,” she reveals in her memoir, Inside Out. “If I got on a scale, it could ruin my entire day. I have journals upon journals from that period, full of writing about my pain and torture over my body. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and binge eat and then be covered in crumbs in the morning. I even put a lock on my refrigerator at one point. It was like food had become a weapon to use in a war against my body, the enemy.”
Demi Moore had a director tell her that she needed to lose weight to land a movie role
Before Moore’s career began to flourish, she was a smoker. She gave up cigarettes after getting sober, which caused her to put on a healthy amount of weight. Yet the director of a movie she was set to star in said she needed to change her body if she wanted to keep the part.
“You are really who I would like to do this film,” said Ed Zwick, the director of One Crazy Summer. “But you would have to promise me that you would lose weight.”
This caused a flood of panic to overcome her. She writes, “I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live. I felt a combination of sick, pit-of-my-stomach mortification, and raw panic. And so began my process of trying to dominate and control my body- and of equating my worth to my weight, my size, my exterior.”
Moore says that she didn’t approach this issue in a “rational, healthy way.” She says, “I was thrown into a tailspin of terror and self-loathing.”
Demi Moore is now comfortable being her ‘natural size’
According to the actor, she now has a much healthier relationship with her body. Instead of loathing the numbers on the scale and “starving herself,” as she puts it, she now has the strength to be her actual size.
And after starring in a film where she had to bulk up, she didn’t feel the need to shed the added pounds.
“My usual reaction would have been to start starving myself again, to begin an exercise regime, but I did neither,” she writes. “I had reached my limit. When I got home to Idaho, I had an epiphany in the shower one day: I just need to be my natural size.”
Moore says that after her epiphany, she gave up on exercise and instead took up meditation. “I couldn’t go on fighting my body and my weight; I had to make peace, and I started by giving up hard exercise.”
