Britney Spears reveals her father put her on a diet because she was ‘fat’

During the past few days, more information is starting to come out about the years in which Britney Spears claims to have suffered abuse from her own father. This dark stage of her life is featured over several pages of the singer’s memoir: The Woman in Me which went on general sale on Tuesday. One of the latest revelations that the pop princess has offered concerned how her father controlled many aspects of her life - including what she ate.

According to the Toxic signer, her father, Jamie Spears, imposed a strict diet on her that allowed her to eat, “Almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables”. Limiting his daughter’s food intake was not the only way that her father controlled her adolescent years - monitoring and harassment were an everyday part of her daily life.

“No matter what I did, my dad was there watching. I couldn’t drive a car. Everybody who came to my trailer had to sign waivers,” Britney explains in her book, adding that her father excused his psychological tormenting and controlling behavior by claiming he was doing it purely for her own good. “Everything was very, very safe - so safe I couldn’t breathe. And no matter how much I dieted and exercised, my father was always telling me I was fat”.

Butler given strict orders

There was a certain irony in the situation for Britney, who saw a paradoxical contradiction in the figure of her domestic servant. “He put me on a strict diet. The irony was that we had a butler - an extravagance; and I would beg him for real food. ‘Sir,’ I would plead, ‘Can you please sneak a hamburger or ice cream to me?’ ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry,’ he would say, ‘I have strict orders from your father.’ So for two years, I ate almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables,” she recalled.

It was an exasperating time for Britney, but as the years rolled by, she has been able to reflect on it in a different light. Rather than it being unfair that she was not being able to eat what she felt like, it was the oppression and the curtailment of freedom that made her suffer the most. “Two years is a long time to not be able to eat what you want, especially when it’s your body and your work and your soul making the money that everyone’s living off of. Two years of asking for french fries and being told, ‘No’. I found it so degrading,” the 41-year-old star added.

The last straw for the singer came when she realized that her dieting and suffering not only made her feel worse, but had the opposite effect - she began to put on weight rather than lose it. Her father, she says, made her feel “very ugly and like she wasn’t good enough,” she says. “My body was strong enough to carry two children and agile enough to execute every choreographed move perfectly onstage. And now here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body”.