TORONTO, CANADA  [Wednesday Jul.7.2004]  /WMQT.com/ -- Alanis Morissette's fans love her journal-style lyrics. Through her songs, Morissette opens up about her life in a personal way and shares her triumphs and struggles. One of the struggles Morissette has written about is her recovery from an eating disorder.

In a recent interview with MTV, Morissette said her body-image issues started in her teens, when she was a child star. She acknowledged that comments made by someone she dated as a teenager made her question if she was thin enough and good enough. Morissette told MTV, "As a young girl, I felt demeaned, and that hurt me. I made that to mean that I was bad and terrible. There was a lot of focus on what the external was, and God bless him and God bless society on some level for having that take, but it was definitely at odds with my take." She continued, "I struggled with eating disorders all through my teen years, and some of it was because of that, and some of it was just because of magazines and society and messages and family and school and everything."

Morissette said it took a lot of work and wasn't an easy process to get over her body-image issues and accept herself as she was. The artists said she went through a good deal of therapy and also worked with life coaches to help with the healing process. Writing songs was also therapeutic. "I can love the fact that I'm very stupid and very smart, that I'm brilliant and an idiot, vulnerable and powerful and everything in between," Morissette said, "and then I'm much more peaceful, because I'm not fighting against any part of myself anymore. The struggle is gone. The struggle of resisting certain parts of myself, trying to hide it, is gone." Morissette added, "Well, it's going away, it's not entirely gone."

Like the song "Eight Easy Steps," which will be Morissette's next single from "So Called Chaos," she concludes that self-improvement is the "course of a lifetime."

Morissette explained, "That song is really about busting my own chops. It's really about taking some of the more difficult experiences in my life and getting the gifts from them. A lot of times I think of it as, since I struggled with eating disorders as a teenager, then if I'm talking to a young woman or if I eventually have a daughter, I'll be able to share with her, or at least listen to her in a way that's empathetic." Morissette continued, "Sometimes I don't realize why something happened until I get the gift of it. Sometimes I get it within an hour, sometimes 10 years later." She added with a laugh, "The sooner version would be better."

For more information, go to http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1488792/20040630/morissette_alanis.jhtml?headlines=true&_requestid=355580.

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