Lorde is opening up about some recent health issues. In a Rolling Stone cover story published on May 15, the singer revealed that she developed an eating disorder and spoke candidly about her experiences, recalling how she would “starve herself” and compulsively keep track of her caloric intake.
Lorde particularly struggled while doing press for her 2021 album, Solar Power. On the day it was released, she felt thin but also “not thin enough,” leading her to take more drastic measures. “I felt so hungry and so weak,” she said. “I was on TV [that] morning, and I didn’t eat because I wanted my tummy to be small in the dress. It was just this sucking of a life force or something.”
By the time she set out on a world tour for the album in 2022, Lorde hadn’t yet admitted to herself that her habits had turned into an eating disorder. She had conflicting emotions at time. On the one hand, she loved so much about the tour — and even wrote in her email newsletter that the Solar Power shows had “set so much right” within her — but on the other hand, she was still fighting a private, internal battle.
“I don’t know how those two things can be true: that I’m having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids, and [yet] I’m also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become,” she explained.
Lorde first hinted at battling an eating disorder on her hit remix of Charli xcx’s “Girl, so confusing.” “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures,” she sang. “‘Cause for the last couple years, I’ve been at war with my body / I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back.”
It wasn’t until she went through a breakup and relocated to New York at the end of 2023 that she realized her disordered eating habits were no longer serving her. In fact, she says once she became less consumed with tracking calories and restricting herself, her creative floodgates opened, which helped her create her upcoming album, Virgin.
“I had all this energy for making stuff,” she said. “I could see that if I cut that cord, maybe I would get something back that I needed to do my work. And it was totally true. Got it all back, and way more.”
If you or someone you know has an eating disorder and needs help, call the National Eating Disorders Association helpline at 1-800-931-2237, text 741741, or chat online with a Helpline volunteer here.
