Shawn Mendes has always been there for girlfriend Camila Cabello‘s needs, and that includes her self-described habit of “anxious eating” and her relationship with her body image.
“I have this pattern of eating a lot when I’m anxious or uncomfortable,” she told Glamour in their first international issue. “It’s a comfort thing for me. I’ll just kind of become unconscious and zombie-eat a lot, and then, I’ll feel sick,” the 24-year-old singer explained.
“At the VMAs party, I was like, ‘I’m doing it.’ And he was like, ‘It’s okay. You’re doing it. That’s okay. Let’s just take a breath and not do that,’” Camila recalled of Shawn’s support. “It’s really good for me to be able to talk about my patterns with someone.”
The “Havana” songstress has found that she the more she loves her body, the less likely she is to binge-eat.
“When I’m having negative thoughts about my body, that’s actually when I’ll want to binge-eat cookies, and then, I have a stomachache,” she revealed. “It’s this weird psychology: the more I love my body, the more I actually want to take care of it … As long as I’m healthy and working out and feel good, that’s the best I can do. There’s no point in trying to have another kind of body.”
Camila was the victim of body-shaming in June 2021, after unedited photos of her in a tie-dyed bikini on the beach in Miami went viral. “This hurts so bad,” Camila recalled in an August interview with Bustle. “The whole day I felt insecure. I felt like it was changing how I was thinking about food and eating … really messing me up.”
She later clapped back with a TikTok video where Camila exclaimed, “Being at war with your body is so last season.” She added, “We are real women with curves and cellulite and stretch marks and fat. And we got to own that, baby.”
Camila is a big fan of therapy, as is 23-year-old Shawn. “When stuff that’s negative is out there, it’s going to get to you. So yeah, that’s very, very challenging. I feel like it’s another thing therapy has been really helpful for.”
“For better, for worse, we’re very transparent with each other. I think that’s why we can trust each other so much, because it’s a very 3D human relationship,” Camila shared about her boyfriend of more than two years. “I’ll be venting or ranting about something, and he’ll be like, ‘Have you talked to X about it?’ And I’ll be like, ‘No. I’ve got to do a session.’ And he’ll do the same thing to me. I think even just the language of being like, ‘Hey, I’m sorry that I’ve been distant with you or snappy with you. I’m just struggling and I’m feeling kind of anxious.’ That level of transparency really helps a lot.”
Shawn agreed with his girlfriend’s thoughts on mental health. “Camila and I give each other an extreme amount of patience and understanding. I think the truth is that when you’re struggling with mental health, it turns you sometimes into the version of yourself that you don’t like to be — and kind of loving and accepting your person through that, and being there for them through that, is life-changing,” he explained, adding, “We give each other so much space and understanding and patience.”