JoJo is opening up about physique picture, revealing in a prolonged and candid interview that she was put on a weight loss program the place she solely ate 500-calorie a day when she was simply 18 years previous.
After she was launched into stardom at simply 13, the “Leave (Get Out)” hitmaker says that she was so determined to launch new music that she was prepared to attempt something — even the ultra-restrictive weight loss program.
Speaking with Uproxx, JoJo, now 29, stated that she thought the explanation her label wasn’t releasing her new music was “the way in which that I regarded.”
“Because after I was 18, I keep in mind being sat down within the Blackground workplace, and the president of the label being like, ‘We simply need you to look as wholesome as attainable,’” she recalled.
JoJo stated that she knew she was wholesome however was restricted to solely 500 energy a day nonetheless. According to Health.gov, an 18-year-old woman dwelling an lively way of life ought to eat no less than 2,400 energy per day.
“I used to be like, ‘I’m truly the image of well being,’” JoJo continued in her Uproxx interview. “‘I truly appear like a wholesome woman who eats and is lively. And I don’t suppose that is about my well being. I believe that you really want me to be actually skinny.’”
“And he’s like, ‘No, I wouldn’t say that,’ blah blah blah,” JoJo recalled. “But I ended up getting put with a nutritionist that had me on a 500 calorie a day weight loss program, and I used to be on these injections that make you don’t have any urge for food.”
RELATED: JoJo Opens Up About Her Parents’ Addiction Struggles and Her Own Drinking Problem and Depression: ‘I Will Not Be a Victim’
“I used to be like, ‘Let me see how skinny I can get, as a result of perhaps then they’ll put out an album. Maybe I’m simply so disgusting that nobody desires to see me in a video and so they can’t even take a look at me,’” JoJo recalled considering. “That’s actually what I believed.”
JoJo | Matt Baron/Shutterstock
JoJo stated that her expertise speaks to a bigger drawback throughout the music business.
“I’m positive a lot of us develop excessive insecurities and disordered consuming and actually unhealthy occupied with ourselves,” she stated. “I felt that how I used to be should have been not sufficient. Must have been dissatisfying.”
“So I began getting actually f— up, consuming, making out with strangers, in search of validation and a focus and seeking to really feel fairly, seeking to really feel good, to really feel worthy,” she continued.
“There have been positively nights that I stumbled out of golf equipment and that I blacked out. I used to be simply utterly reckless, didn’t care,” she admitted. “I wanted to be buzzed to really feel ok. I might go to the sting, stand on my tiptoes on the sting after which come again.”
JoJo | Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images
RELATED: JoJo New Single F Apologies, Announces First Album Since Label Lawsuit
“I ought to be useless,” she stated, explaining that her father, Joel, who died in 2015, was an addict and that she stopped utilizing substances as a result of “I might’ve ended up like my dad, simply going to sleep at some point and never waking up. Because life is difficult.”
The “Too Little, Too Late” singer was lastly launched from her contract with Blackground Records in 2014 after an intense authorized battle, and opened as much as PEOPLE about her expertise two years later.
“Sometimes I really feel insufficient; generally I really feel like I can fall again into despair,” she instructed PEOPLE in 2016. “For a whereas, I coped by consuming an excessive amount of. I needed to get out of my thoughts. I needed to cease choosing myself aside. I simply needed to really feel good, to chase that prime. I needed to cease worrying about my profession. And if you get out of your thoughts, if you get to that time if you blackout, you don’t give a s— about something.”
