Shania Twain remembers how she ‘hated’ her ‘body’
Shania Twain has opened up about a deeply difficult period in her relationship with her body, revealing she could not bring herself to look in the mirror during her 2019 Las Vegas residency.
Speaking to London’s The Times, the 60-year-old singer described the experience with striking honesty.
“I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. I hated my body,” she said.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, I cannot stand this changing body.’ But that was so unhealthy. Who cannot look at themselves in the mirror?”
The physical demands of the residency pushed her to cope in ways she now recognises were harmful.
“I was working my body more than I was feeding it to keep up with the strain,” she admitted, saying it left her malnourished and ultimately led to an onstage injury.
Twain said she felt a loss of control that she had not experienced before, unable to simply shed a few pounds the way she once might have.
“So, all of a sudden, I’m bloating and I’m definitely not in control. I can’t just lose five pounds.”
To manage it, she turned to what she described as “very unhealthy things.”
The shift in her mindset, she said, came through menopause and the acceptance it brought.
“I’m like, ‘Bring on the mirrors. I’m going to look at myself all day long!'”, a line delivered with the kind of hard-won confidence that clearly took years to arrive.
It is not the first time Twain has spoken with such openness about her body image.
In an interview with Us Weekly in March 2025, she traced her insecurities back to her youth, describing 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 goes, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I said, ‘A bodybuilder.’ I wanted to be a big, strong man that nobody was going to f*** around 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.
