Shania Twain has 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 stay in Las Vegas in 2019.
Speaking to Londoners The Timesthe 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 can’t keep this changing body.’ But it was so unhealthy. Who can’t look at themselves in the mirror?”
The physical demands of the residency pushed her to cope in ways she now recognizes were harmful.
“I was working my body more than I was feeding it to keep up with the workload,” she admitted, saying it left her malnourished and ultimately led to an injury on stage.
Twain said she felt a loss of control she hadn’t experienced before, unable to simply shed a few pounds as she once might have.
“Then all of a sudden I’m bloated and I’m definitely not in control. I can’t just lose five pounds.”
To cope, she turned to what she described as “very unhealthy things.”
The shift in her thinking, she said, came through menopause and the acceptance it brought.
“I’m like, ‘Bring on the mirrors. I want to look at myself all day long!'”, a line delivered with the kind of hard-won confidence that clearly took years to arrive at.
This is not the first time Twain has spoken so openly 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 altogether.
“I hated being a girl,” she said. “My mom says, ‘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 wanted to mess with.”
She also pointed to the culture of thinness that defined beauty standards in her formative years as a major influence on how she saw herself.
