Demi Moore is on a roll. At 62, she’s just won her first Golden Globe for her performance in The Substance and could be in line for an Oscar. She’s also never been in a better place mentally and, in her acceptance speech, highlighted the importance of loving yourself.
“In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough; just know you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down a measuring stick,” she said. “And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me, and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong. Thank you so much.”
Throughout her career, Moore’s relationship with both her mental and physical health has been tumultuous. Here’s what she’s shared about her approach to fitness over the years, and how no longer doing “hard exercise” helped her find self-love.
She became obsessed with her appearance early in her career
In her 2019 memoir Inside Out, Moore wrote that she “didn’t feel like I could stop exercising” while filming A Few Good Men. “It was my job to fit into that unforgiving military uniform for two months,” she said. “Getting in shape for that movie launched the obsession with working out that would consume me.”
In a 2020 interview, Moore revealed that she was “completely in a panic” while working on the film. “[I was] dieting and exercising in a very obsessive-compulsive way… I changed my body over multiple times but wasn’t really myself.”
Moore felt pressure to lose weight after having her second child
Moore gave birth to her second child roughly six months before filming 1993 movie Indecent Proposal and pushed herself too hard while trying to lose weight quickly. “I put so much pressure on myself,” she told CBS Sunday Morning in 2024. “I did have experiences of being told to lose weight. And all of those, while they may have been embarrassing and humiliating, it’s what I did to myself because of that.”
“I was getting up in the dark with a trainer, biking all the way to Paramount [studios], even on location where we were shooting. Then shooting a full day, which is usually a 12-hour day, and then starting all over again,” she continued. “Even just the idea of, like, what I did to my body, it’s so crazy, so ridiculous. You look back and you kinda go, did it really matter that much?’ Probably not.”
After filming G.I. Jane she quit going to the gym altogether
After a half-decade of disordered exercise, Moore ended her relationship with the gym after she finished filming G.I. Jane in 1997. She had to bulk up for the role as a military officer and as a result found herself heavier than usual once filming had concluded. But this time, she took a more balanced approach.
“My usual reaction would have been to start starving myself again, to begin an exercise regime designed to reduce the bulk, but I did neither. I had reached my limit,” she wrote in her memoir. “When I got home to Idaho, I had an epiphany in the shower one day: I just need to be my natural size.”
“I was so kind of worn down in this battle that I had been in that I finally surrendered,” she later told The New York Times. “I just started to ask to be my natural size because I didn’t know what it was. I literally couldn’t go in a gym. I couldn’t control food in that way.”
“I added into my daily prayer a new mantra: to have the courage to be seen without padding or protection. I couldn’t go on fighting my body and my weight; I had to make peace,” she added. “I started by giving up hard exercise. I never went back into the gym in the house. Never. The room it occupied is now my office.”
Now, she’s more focused on self-confidence
As she touched on in her Golden Globes speech, Moore has learnt to love herself. She now feels “emotionally sober,” which impacts “the quality of how I interact with people and my ability to show up for others,” she told The New York Times.
“That’s all within my emotional sobriety… I can go into a room, a gathering, and if I’m uncomfortable, I don’t need to try to take the edge off it,” she added. “I can actually just go: Oh, wow. Isn’t that interesting? I’m a little uncomfortable right now.’”
With her new outlook on health and body image, Moore is finished with chasing impossible goals and holding herself to unrealistic standards. Now, she’s happy, healthy and wants others to feel the same.
“That deep reminder of appreciating who you are, as you are, where you are, just resonated more as [filming The Substance] went along,” she said during her Golden Globes speech. “And not just the external. Really, all of those internal things of who we are that we often can overlook. And the journey of what it’s taken to get where you are.”
