Lady Gaga [2] never ceases to surprise us. The singer was being interviewed by the journalist and author Maria Shriver about bullying at school and suddenly she confessed that when she was in high school she was bulimic. “Eat all your spaghetti! Mangia mangia,” her father used to tell Stefani Germanotta when she was a skinny adolescent who had just got home from school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart [3] on Fifth Avenue, in New York, to find herself facing a large plate of pasta.
 

The singer of 'Born This Way' was indeed raised in the Upper West Side in an Italian-American family of humble origins. Yes, she grew up with the children of the city's rich elite, but father Joseph and mother Cynthia came from traditional and modest backgrounds, and the star was often fed a staple of Italian immigrant cuisine “spaghetti and meatballs.”
 

“I used to throw up all the time in high school,” Gaga admitted. “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. ,” the singer confessed during It's Our Turn, a conference for young female students held at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles over the weekend that has been featured by the British press. “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 testimony is said to be owed to a comment from an audience member. A young girl stood up to say “I fight with my body daily while you look so sure of yourself. It shows in how you dress... I wonder how you can do it.”

This insecurity is typical among female teenagers, yet it moved the 25 year old singer who decided to shed some light on an obscure phase of her life. During the interview, Maria Shriver, Arnold Schwarzenegger's ex wife, asked her what actually helped her get through that sticky situation. “The acid in my stomach had corroded my vocal chords. Talking about it is not that hard now because I don't do it anymore, but I used to throw up constantly when I was in high school.”
The star continued to explain that when in high school she was the happy protagonist of several theater/musical productions but “bulimia had totally destroyed her voice and she had to stop singing. There are no excuses, not even for those who don't sing. It is very, very dangerous.”

And the confessions continued to flow... Gaga added that even after dealing with bulimia and recuperating she was not completely happy with her image. “Weight is still a struggle. Every video I'm in, every magazine cover, they stretch you -- they make you perfect,” she confessed. “It's not real life. I'm gonna say this about girls: The dieting has got to stop. Everyone just knock it off. Because at the end of the day, it's affecting kids your age -- and it's making girls sick.”

The Huffington Post [4] reports that “Gaga sent a positive message to the students, but it's a far cry from remarks she made just a few years ago. In 2010, she told New York Magazine [5], 'Pop stars should not eat,' and the magazine noted that Gaga 'looked flush from a strict diet of starvation.'”
 

An earlier article from 2009 published on softpedia.com entitled “Lady Gaga stays thin by starving herself” reporters mention a story in gossip magazine US Weekly [6] “about how she stays in shape. Asked by the magazine if there’s anything special she does to maintain her figure, other than dancing a lot and possibly hitting the gym as well every once in a while, Gaga’s answer was as blunt as it is potentially upsetting for the fans who look up to her. 'It’s all about starvation!'”
 

Knowing Lady Gaga and her constant provocations, it could very well be that the above was said as a joke or better yet, as a reflection of her own struggle with weight and appearance... yes she is a star but she is a woman after all. A woman battling the same wars we do.