Britney Spears Details Her Restrictive Diet For Her Las Vegas Residency

Britney Spears underwent drastic measures to perform her Las Vegas show — and not always by choice. In her new memoir The Woman In Me, the singer detailed the restrictive diet she followed for her four-year Las Vegas residency Piece of Me, and alleged that it was forced by her father, former conservator Jamie Spears.

“No matter how much I dieted and exercised, my father was always telling me I was fat,” she writes. “He put me on a strict diet.”

While under her conservatorship, Spears recalled that her team had hired a butler, calling it an “extravagance,” and said she “would beg him for real food” like a hamburger or ice cream. However, she claims that he would apologize and tell her, “I have strict orders from your father.”

Spears’ Intense Diet

Under the regimen allegedly set by her father, Spears “ate almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables” for over two years, calling the experience “degrading.”

“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,” she writes. “Two years of asking for french fries and being told no.”

While the strict diet was “bad enough,” Spears said the worst part of this ordeal was losing control over her body and diet. “When someone is depriving you of food you want, that makes it worse,” she writes.

“I felt like my body wasn’t mine anymore. I would go to the gym and feel so out of my mind with this trainer telling me to do things with my body, I felt cold inside. I felt scared. I’ll be honest, I was f*cking miserable.”

The Effects Of Her Strict Diet

Earlier in the memoir, Spears said that body-shaming comments cut deeper when it came from her own family. “If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father,” she writes.

“He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”

Spears claimed that the diet ended up having the opposite effect of what her father had intended and caused her to actually gain weight. “Even though I wasn’t eating as much, he made me feel so ugly and like I wasn’t good enough,” she writes.

The experience brought back memories of her body being analyzed and criticized by the public when she was a young starlet, sarcastically saying it was “incredible” that so many people had opinions about her physical appearance.

“People seemed to experience my body as public property: something they could police, control, criticize, or use as a weapon,” she writes.

“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.”