Tallulah Willis is young, wealthy and in the public eye, but that doesn’t mean life has been a cakewalk for her. The 20-year-old revealed her struggles with body dysmorphia and an eating disorder as a teenager for StyleLikeU‘s The What’s Underneath Project.
The Clothing Coven blogger opened up on camera about the body issues that plagued her teenage years, noting that her obsession with her appearance started when she was 13: “Reading those like stupid f****ng tabloids when I was 13, feeling like I was ugly, always. I believed the strangers more than the people that love me because, why would the people who love me be honest?”
Public scrutiny of her body led Tallulah to dress sexier, showing off her curves in short shorts and push-up bras. “I would read these things on the Internet and I was like, ‘Well, why would somebody write that if there wasn’t some basis for truth there?’ OK, cool, I have a good body and that’s attractive to people, I got that, cool, I’ll just use that…It’s going to make up for what I’m lacking in my face.”
But she says she soon discovered that this was not the version of herself she wanted to project to the world. “By the time I realized that wasn’t who I was anymore, it was like I was trapped in this body, and I hated that I was sexy,” she says. “That’s when I first started starving myself and losing a bunch of weight. And I got down to like, 95 lbs. When I lost my curves, when my boobs shriveled up into nothing and I had no shape and I was just saggy skin everywhere. I was like, ‘Hey, you believe me now?'”
But losing all the weight only made her situation worse: “I viewed super skinny me as smart and intelligent. I was able to have the physical transformation, so that everyone could see me differently kind of, and they did. But actually, it was the reverse because I was creating more of a cage in myself and developing more of an issue.” Through the video, we see her slowly strip down until she is wearing nary but a black bra and lacy, high-waisted black panties. It’s certainly a physical manifestation of her revealing her truth to the world.
Tallulah hopes that telling her story through this feature and through her writing will inspire other women to realize that their bodies are perfectly fine the way they are. “That feeling you’re supposed to have on your wedding day, which is like a princess — why not have that every day?” she asks. “It’s inside you the whole time! It’s just you.”
Watch Tallulah talk about her body struggles and triumphs as she gradually strips down to her skivvies.
[h/t People]
