She’s not sorry! Demi Lovato is showing the importance of self-love and accepting your flaws in a series of Instagram posts. The Grammy-nominated singer, 25, took to social media on Friday, April 6, to share that although she’s not perfect, she still loves herself.
Lovato shared a Boomerang video of herself grabbing the skin around her belly button while lying in bed. “Stretch marks and extra fat … and yet I still love myself,” she captioned the post on her Instagram Story. She shared another short clip of herself from behind, dancing in front of a mirror: “Cellulite and yet I still love myself.”
In the following text post, she wrote: “The boomerang smoothed out my legs. The point is, I have cellulite just like the other 93% of women do. What you see on Instagram isn’t always what it seems to be. Let’s embrace our real selves. #iloveme.”
The Disney Channel alum shared one other pic of herself wearing a black shirt tied into a crop top showing off her toned midsection, and a pair of light gray shorts. “No thigh gap for me,” she wrote. “And yet I still love myself.”
The “Tell Me You Love Me” singer opened up about her battle with bulimia nervosa in her YouTube documentary, Simply Complicated, in October 2017. She revealed that her June 2016 breakup from her boyfriend of six years, Wilmer Valderrama, had caused her eating disorder to resurface.
“When I was in a relationship with Wilmer I went three years without purging and when we broke up that’s one of the first things I did,” she said. “The less I have to think about food, the easier it is to go about having a normal life and I don’t want to let anybody down so when I do have moments when I slip up, I feel very ashamed. What started the relapse was missing Wilmer. And when I feel lonely my heart feels hungry and I end up binging.”
She also shared that her struggle with food started at a young age. “I would bake cookies for my family and I would eat all of them and nobody would have any to eat. That was my first memory of food being that medicine for me,” she said in the documentary. “Food is still the biggest challenge in my life and it controls — I don’t want to give it the power to say it controls my every thought, but it’s something that I’m constantly thinking about.”
She added: “Body image, what I’m going to eat next, what I wish I could be eating, what I wish I didn’t eat. It’s just constant. Like I get envious toward people that don’t struggle with an eating disorder just because I feel like my life would be so much easier.”
Lovato also revealed in her documentary that she relies on the gym and physical activity to keep her balanced. “Working out is a form of meditation for me because I’m not focused on anything in my head,” she said. “It can transport you to a totally different place.”
