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Florence Welch is finally opening up about having an eating disorder and how she’s using her music to share her story. In the upcoming Florence and the Machine album High as Hope, Welch is sharing her story with the lead single, “Hunger,” where she candidly sings about the various struggles she experienced as a teen, including having an eating disorder.
Starting the song off with, “At 17, I started to starve myself,” Welch recently told The Guardian’s Observer that writing the song was “the first time I’ve been able to put it on paper” and speak out about her eating disorder publicly.
The 31-year-old singer admitted that she was terrified to talk about her eating disorder for the first time, but that she felt she needed to do it for herself. Welch also revealed that her symptoms were part of a series of coping mechanisms she used to deal with her fears she had growing up. “I learned ways to manage that terror — drink, drugs, controlling food,” she said. “It was like a renaissance of childhood, a toddler’s self-destruction let loose in a person with grown-up impulses.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GHXEGz3PJg
Welch went on to say that by putting her experiences in a song, it allowed for the singer to discuss an issue that she might not have been able to in other ways.
“I know how to deal with it in a song, but a lot of stuff I’m… still figuring out?” she said when asked what she felt triggered the eating disorder as a teen.
“I can say things in a song I don’t understand yet, like: ‘I thought love was a kind of emptiness’ — that feels important. You think love is unreachable, empty, hungry, then there’s a kind of sadness when something more stable comes towards you. You don’t recognize it as love because it’s not desperate enough. And I’ve never tied the two together until now.”
Now as an adult, Welch says her eating disorder is successfully in remission and that she is also sober. “I’m further away from it than I ever have been,” Florence said. “It was something I experienced and I’m 31 now and at a time where I can perhaps… see what I was looking for?”
If you are struggling with an eating disorder and are in need of support, please call the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. For a 24-hour crisis line, text “NEDA” to 741741.
