Demi Moore For Harper’s Bazaar February 2012

Demi Moore’s bones cover Harper’s Bazaar February 2012 since they’re in denial and fishing for compliments between the glossy pages. All I have to say is, ‘Lose three pounds, bones, fat is for fatties.’ Oddly, after filing for divorce only weeks ago, this interview seems to be mostly about her body image and the divorce diet that had the same effect on her as it did Eva Longoria. Moore told the magazine: ‘I have a love-hate relationship with my body [sometimes I feel] my body’s betraying me.’ There’s a little more depth to the rest of the interview, a conversation with Amanda de Cadenet, which can be found below.

On her body image as she gets older: ‘I have had a love-hate relationship with my body. When I’m at the greatest odds with my body, it’s usually because I feel my body’s betraying me, whether that’s been in the past, struggling with my weight and feeling that I couldn’t eat what I wanted to eat, or that I couldn’t get my body to do what I wanted it to do.’
On accepting her body: ‘I think I sit today in a place of greater acceptance of my body, and that includes not just my weight but all of the things that come with your changing body as you age to now experiencing my body as extremely thin; thin in a way that I never imagined somebody would be saying to me, ‘You’re too thin, and you don’t look good.”
On making her peace with it: ‘I find peace when I don’t see my body as my enemy, when I step back and have appreciation and look at all that my body has done for me. It’s allowed me to give birth to three beautiful children, allowed me to explore different roles as an actor, allowed me to be strong. You can’t look at yourself in the mirror and tear your body apart. You have to look at it and go, ‘Thank you. Thank you for standing by me, for being there for me no matter what I have put you through.”
On her religion: ‘Having no understanding of [the forces of the world] has always made me a seeker of spirituality. I think we all have. I think we both share a really unconventional path. That sense of oneness. I have studied Kabbalah for the last eight, nine years, and I feel like a student of Kabbalah, but I feel more so a student and seeker of the truth. In anything I’ve read, whether it’s considered self-help or spiritual modalities, it’s a recognition of a knowing of a truth. It doesn’t matter what the words are or how it’s being presented. You just identify it.’
On her guilty pleasures: ‘Watching Jersey Shore, because it’s such a train wreck. It’s excessive behavior being rewarded, which in truth is painful to watch, but you just can’t look away! No, it does [serve a purpose]. And it’s guilty only because I think guilt constitutes knowing that you’re doing something that’s probably not good, but you’re enjoying it anyway. My real, other guilty pleasure, and it’s totally stupid, is those long-distance flights where you are able to change into those pajamas they give you without ever leaving your seat and nobody can see your body exposed. It is an absolute guilty pleasure in the sense that I derive pure joy and some weird sense of accomplishment over being able to do it.’
On realisations as an adult: ‘I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, ‘Only children can be abandoned. Adults can’t be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don’t have a choice.’ So I started to rethink. ‘Okay, it’s not that. What’s the underlying thread that really scares me?’ I think what scares me is not having the courage to reach my full potential… Well, what I said is not having the courage to really reach my fullest potential, which means that I would allow fear, insecurity, and doubt to rule me and that I would ask for only a little of what is actually there for me. It would mean that I would be settling.’
On her self-esteem: ‘Well… we don’t live in black and white, we live in the gray. So to answer the question ‘Have I become more comfortable with myself as a woman?’ I would say that I have in the sense of valuing myself, certainly more than I did when I was a teenager.’