Gaga turned up at Brentwood School last weekend (04Feb12) for a
special interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger's estranged wife Maria
Shriver for the It's Our Turn event, and the flamboyant star
stunned the audience by revealing all about her attempts to slim
down in high school.
She said, "I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I'm
not that confident. I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I
was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the
table every night.
"I used to come home and say, 'Dad, why do you always give us this
food? I need to be thin.' And he'd say, 'Eat your spaghetti'."
The then-aspiring singer eventually overcame her urge to force
herself to vomit after eating, admitting, "It made my voice bad, so
I had to stop. The acid on your vocal chords - it's very bad."
But that doesn't mean Gaga is completely at ease with her body
image now she's a pop idol: "Weight is still a struggle. Every
video I'm in, every magazine cover, they stretch you - they make
you perfect. It's not real life."
And Gaga has urged young girls struggling with their
self-confidence to reach out for help: "It's really hard, but...
you've got to talk to somebody about it."