Lady Gaga has revealed that she was bulimic in high school, desperate to transform herself from “a voluptuous little Italian girl” to a “skinny little ballerina.”
Gaga revealed this information at a conference called “It’s Our Turn” held at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles over the weekend, according to reports. Gaga was a surprise guest at the event. While the “Born This Way” singer sat down for a 30-minute interview with Maria Shriver, the topic of eating disorders didn’t come up until the question-and-answer session, when a girl told Gaga that she struggled with her body image and wanted to know how the singer was so confident.
“I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I’m not that confident,” said Gaga. “I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night. I used to come home and say, ‘Dad, why do you always give us this food? I need to be thin.’ And he’d say, ‘Eat your spaghetti.’ It’s really hard, but … you’ve got to talk to somebody about it.”
Gaga said that at one point her bulimia got so bad that it began to damage her voice.
“It made my voice bad, so I had to stop,” she said. “The acid on your vocal cords — it’s very bad. But for those of you who don’t sing, you maybe don’t have that excuse until it’s too late. It’s very dangerous.”
Gaga revealed that she still often worries about her body, despite being one of the most famous pop stars in the world.
“Weight is still a struggle,” she said. “Every video I’m in, every magazine cover, they stretch you — they make you perfect. It’s not real life … I’m gonna say this about girls: The dieting wars have got to stop. Everyone just knock it off. Because at the end of the day, it’s affecting kids your age. And it’s making girls sick.”