Miley Cyrus opens up to Demi Lovato about body image issues

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato went on Instagram Live for the second time to support Miley’s Bright Minded series.

During their discussion, the two singers spoke at length about social distancing, and how it is changing the very fabric of people's lives.

Cyrus used her platform to share her own personal experiences with body image. They also discussed online culture at large and its polarizing impacts. For example, seeing memes of Miley being photoshopped next to a turkey ahead of her 2013 VMA performance altered the singer's view of her body, in a negative light.

Miley was quoted saying, “I basically went through two or three years where I wouldn’t wear shorts. I stopped wearing skirts on stage, all this shit because after the VMAs, and I had on my cute little nude bodysuit, everyone started comparing me to a turkey and putting a turkey in my outfit.”

“I was just so skinny and so pasty and they kept putting me next to this turkey, and I was feeling so bad on myself that I did not wear a bikini for like two years and no one thought that would ever make me feel some type of way.”

Due to the toxic nature of the industry, Miley began to make “something bigger” with her Happy Hippie foundation. The biggest reason for this was “because it just made me feel so bad about myself.”

“It was like, I was probably 21. I was just kind of starting to like understand myself as an independent person and it was just really, really hurtful just to be like so body-shamed like that. And it really affected me in my personal life of just changing the way I would be or like not wearing shorts to the beach. It just changed my personal life.”

“And what was so hard about it was my brand has always been about being so unapologetically myself and being confident and the worst thing I would feel I would be to my fans is like lying or a fraud.”

Miley concluded by saying, “but I felt like having this persona of being the most confident girl on the planet was actually kind of fraud because I was so insecure on the inside that in my personal life, I wasn’t even wearing bathing suits or shorts. And when I was wearing like my little leotards and things, I had on fucking four pairs of tights because I was so insecure.”