Shania Twain opened up about a deeply difficult period in her relationship with her body, revealing that she couldn’t bring herself to look in the mirror during her 2019 Las Vegas residency.
Talking to London The timesThe 60-year-old singer described the experience with surprising honesty.
“I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. I hated my body,” she said.
“I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t stand this changing body.’ But that was so unhealthy. Who can’t look in the mirror?”
The physical demands of the residence pushed her to cope in ways she now recognizes were detrimental.
“I worked my body harder than I fueled it to withstand the stress,” she admitted, saying it left her malnourished and ultimately caused an onstage injury.
Twain said he felt a loss of control he had not experienced before, unable to simply lose a few pounds like before.
“Then all of a sudden I feel bloated and I’m definitely not in control. I can’t just lose five pounds.”
To manage it, he turned to what he described as “very unhealthy things.”
The change in her thinking, she said, came through menopause and the acceptance it brought.
“I thought, ‘Bring the mirrors! I’m going to look at myself all day!'” a phrase delivered with the kind of hard-earned confidence that clearly took years to arrive.
This isn’t the first time Twain has spoken so candidly about her body image.
In an interview with Us weekly In March 2025, she traced her insecurities back to her youth and described experiences of inappropriate touching and abuse that made her want to escape her own femininity entirely.
“I hated being a girl,” she said. “My mother asks me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I said, ‘A bodybuilder.’ “I wanted to be a big, strong man that no one was going to mess with.”
She also pointed to the culture of thinness that defined beauty standards during her formative years as a significant influence on how she saw herself.
