Lily Allen recently revealed on her BBC podcast, Miss Me?, that her mental health struggles have significantly impacted her eating habits over the past three years. The singer admitted to co-host Miquita Oliver that she hadn’t discussed this issue with her therapist until recently.
Allen, 39, explained that her therapist questioned why she had never mentioned her eating difficulties before. The singer clarified that she doesn’t intentionally lie in therapy but unintentionally omits certain aspects of her life during sessions. “It’s just because it hasn’t seemed at the top of the list of the important things that I need to talk about,” she stated.
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Lily Allen attending a London event in October 2024.
Allen also questioned if her ADHD diagnosis in 2023 contributed to her omitting her food struggles in therapy. “I don’t link a lot of things,” she admitted. “My body and my brain are two very separate things to me…I spend a lot of time in my head and not a lot of time thinking about my body.”
She described her current mental state as not being in a “great place” and explained her complex relationship with food: “I’m not eating but I’m not hungry — I obviously am hungry but my body and my brain are so disconnected from each other that the messages of hunger are not going from my body to my brain… I’m not avoiding food, I’m just not thinking about it … my body is, like, a few steps behind me.”
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Lily Allen at the Chanel Tribeca Festival Artists Dinner in June 2024.
This isn’t the first time Allen has spoken publicly about her struggles with eating. In 2011, she revealed her past battle with bulimia, triggered by constant praise for her appearance and weight loss. She recalled feeling pressure to maintain a certain image, acknowledging the temporary satisfaction of fitting into smaller clothes but ultimately realizing her unhappiness. “It was great to try on clothes and walk out of the shop feeling a million dollars…But I wasn’t happy, I really wasn’t,” Allen shared. She confessed to desiring to be “the skinniest, mini-est person in the world,” but recognized that achieving this would come at the cost of her happiness and her love for food.
