My thoughts on singer, Lorde’s honesty about her relationship with food

Lorde, the singer-songwriter from New Zealand recently made headlines after speaking out about her appearance at the 2025 Met Gala. Lorde explained to her fans that whilst she recently struggled with her body and tried to change it through managing her food intake, she had now moved on from it.

Talking about food and her body isn’t a new thing for Lorde. In 2021 she openly made comments about how she had restricted her food intake, for her it was in preparation for the red carpet, but restricting food is a decision many make on a day-to-day basis. The sweeping triggering comments normalise eating disorder culture in our society. But beyond this, are they stigmatising and simplifying eating disorders even more?

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Eating disorders have been stigmatised for decades, with society thinking they are a diet gone wrong

Eating disorders have been stigmatised for decades, with society thinking they are a diet gone wrong, about wanting to look a certain way, something that is a choice or only impacting people who fit into a smaller body. These statements couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, eating disorders span across the age range, impact people of all body types, and are not (always) about body image. Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses and ones that need to be treated as such.

Despite this simplification of eating disorders, there are so many similarities with Lorde’s experience and the pressure that she puts on herself that others will no doubt resonate with. Firstly, this narrative that to be happy and successful you need to be a certain body type and in our Western society the trend is to be smaller. People often forget that health is more than a body size.

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I have lived with an eating disorder or been in recovery from an eating disorder for over half my life 

I have lived with an eating disorder or been in recovery from an eating disorder for over half my life and whilst we now know eating disorders such as anorexia are caused by a genetic predisposition with the individual being triggered and then going into an energy deficit which causes the eating disorder, there are a variety of unique things for people that trigger the individual. For me, a contributing factor was the shame I felt as a child. The feelings that there was something categorically wrong with who I was.

When we feel shame and wrong in ourselves, society will tell us to change externally and everything will be fine. So that’s what we do; whether that’s buying a new outfit, losing weight, or changing our hair. We project our feelings of wrongness, anxiety, guilty, sadness onto our bodies. I had to learn that my feelings often dictated how I felt in my body. Take the Met Gala as an example, a high profile event with all eyes on you. Would it be any wonder that the fear of judgement, the anxiety about the evening would project onto our bodies making us question what we look like and as a result cause us to long to “fix” how we felt, and if society says we can “fix” emotions through the external changes that’s what we do.

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For Lorde something changed in 2025 and she said; “I was there last night fully in myself, and I didn’t have to not eat, I didn’t have to go to the gym a million times. I was just fully in myself. Quite beautiful.”

I remember this feeling vividly and it was one of the amazing things about learning to listen to my body again and nourishing myself. I stopped thinking about food all the time and instead had time to think about other things. The thing about eating disorders, they are about so much more than just food, but without feeding ourselves the thoughts of food totally consume us.

Lorde shows a huge amount of strength speaking up about how she feels, but it still worries me how celebs have so much influence and can trigger individuals with these states around not eating potentially causing others to not eat.

Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible, learning to like your body is possible but along the way we continue to pray and interrupt negative thoughts; as the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:5 - take them captive.