Kelly Clarkson: ‘When I Was Really Skinny, I Wanted to Kill Myself’

Clarkson details a dark period early in her career in a new interview.

By Doug Lazy on October 24, 2017

By Hayden Wright

Kelly Clarkson’s new album Meaning of Life debuts this Friday, and the singer has come a long way since her early days in the music industry. Before she took charge of her own image, Clarkson says industry executives and handlers urged her to lose weight. And the pressure to stay thin left her on the brink of self-destruction.

Related: Kelly Clarkson Gets in the Holiday Spirit with New Song ‘Christmas Eve’

“When I was really skinny, I wanted to kill myself,” the original American Idol told Attitude magazine. “I was miserable, like inside and out, for four years of my life…But no one cared because aesthetically you make sense. It was a very dark time for me. I thought the only way out was quitting.”

Instead, Kelly says she threw herself into exercising, which created new health issues and didn’t help her feel any better about herself. In the end, she knew she needed a change.

“I, like, wrecked my knees and my feet because all I would do is put in headphones and run,” she recalled. “I was at the gym all the time. There’s a song on My December called ‘Sober.’ There’s this line ‘picked the weeds but kept the flowers’ and I just live my life by that because you are who you surround yourself with.”

“I was around some really negative people, and I got out of it because I had a lot of great people there, too,” she continued. “It was a case of turning around, facing them and walking toward the light.”

This morning Clarkson took to Twitter to clarify some of the comments in the interview which had been picked up by the press, writing: “Just to clear something up. I wasn’t ever miserable because I had to be thin. I said I was miserable & as a result I became thin.”

“NOT TRUE I’ve never contemplated suicide because of my weight. I said people had no idea I was unhappy oddly enough because I appeared healthy,” she wrote responding to another headline.

[tweet https://twitter.com/kelly_clarkson/status/922829416639508480]

[tweet https://twitter.com/kelly_clarkson/status/922832220192047106]

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