Demi Moore Revealed the Heartbreaking Reason She Developed an Eating Disorder

“There is a lot of torment I put myself through when I was younger,” she recalled.

With The Substance, Demi Moore sought to expose the expectations that women face with society's impossible aging and beauty standards. Filming the movie mirrored some of Moore's own experiences in Hollywood, she revealed in a new interview with Elle, recalling that she had an eating disorder when she was younger due to pressures from her colleagues in Hollywood.

“There is a lot of torment I put myself through when I was younger,” the 62-year-old actress said. “The perfect example is when I was told to lose weight multiple times. The producer pulled me aside. It was very embarrassing and humiliating."

When Moore looks back on it now, she realized that she should not have allowed harsh criticisms from others dictate the way she felt about her body.

"How I internalized it and how it moved me to a place of such torture and harshness against myself, of real extreme behaviors, and that I placed almost all the value of who I was on my body being a certain way—that’s on me,” she added.

Moore has previously opened up about her experiences with eating disorders, and revealed in her memoir, Inside and Out, that after being pregnant with her daughter, Scout Willis, in 1991, she developed an "obsession with working out" due to her role as a naval lawyer in A Few Good Men.

“I didn’t feel like I could stop exercising,” she wrote in the book. “It was my job to fit into that unforgiving military uniform I’d be wearing in two months in A Few Good Men. Getting in shape for that movie launched the obsession with working out that would consume me over the next five years. I never dared let up.”

The obsession with exercise had a negative effect on her breast milk, impacting Scout's growth and require being bottle fed with formula. By the time she would land the role of Diana Murphy in Indecent Proposal, the negative thoughts about her body started up again.

“I would be on display again,” she recalled. “I doubled down on my already over-the-top exercise routine. I cut out carbs, I ran and I biked and I worked out on every machine imaginable.”

She later scaled back on exercise after contracting walking pneumonia, but when she started filming Striptease, she had had enough after falling back into her disordered habits. “That was it,” Moore wrote. “If all this obsessing about my body sounds crazy to you, you’re not wrong: eating disorders are crazy, they are a sickness. But that doesn’t make them less real.”

If you or anyone you know struggling with an eating disorder and need support, call the National Eating Disorders Association helpline at (800) 931-2237, or text TALK to 741741 to message with a crisis counselor from the Crisis Text Line at no cost.