Her battle with low self-esteem has raged for years.
Growing up in Colorado and Texas, Jessica had lots of friends and was the girl everyone would go to for advice. Blonde and perky, she was twice voted Homecoming Princess at J.J. Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas. And there were plenty of guys vying for her affection. But like a lot of teenage girls, Jessica worried incessantly about her weight. In her mind, she was never thin enough.
“There are a lot of people who are really confident, but who have low self-esteem internally,” Jessica explains. “It can be something you don’t like about yourself: ‘Oh, I’m not smart enough.’ For me it’s always been a physical thing.”
Jessica’s high school journals are littered with references to her weight. Take this entry from April 2, 1998, when she was 17 and struggling with the delayed release of her first album:
“I’m really stressed out…. Why did you eat that? You’re never going to look good! You have to use the restroom or you’ll gain weight—and what will people think? Don’t you want to be famous? Your face is so broken out. You’re fat! Another Coke?! Eat, eat, eat, eat—don’t you ever feel sick? I’m beginning to hate myself. What’s wrong with me? Lately, I’ve been forgetting the inside stuff and only concentrating on the outside. I need confidence.”
Luckily, says Tina, “she never went to any extremes like throwing up or getting anorexia.” Although her favorite foods as a teen included chicken-fried steak and Mexican cuisine (“We’re from Texas. We love fattening food,” explains Tina), Jessica was never overweight. In fact, she never wore a size larger than a six. But her body developed at an early age.
“When she was in the eighth grade, she wore a 34D bra,” says Tina. “So she wore sports bras—never a regular bra—and big T-shirts because she wanted to hide it. Because of that, she thought she was fat. But everyone in my family is busty. It’s inherited. She couldn’t help it.”
In December 1999, about a month following the release of Sweet Kisses, Jessica dropped nearly 10 pounds after being rushed to the hospital with a kidney infection. But even then, slimmed down, Jessica couldn’t shake her old insecurities as she prepared to kick her music career into higher gear. And the entertainment business can be nasty. At one of her first photo shoots for a national magazine, a photographer scoffed that she had fat arms. Jessica left the studio in tears.
A year later, she walked into a gym for the first time. Her mother, a former aerobics teacher, went with her, partly for moral support, partly to get back in shape herself. (Jessica’s dad, Joe, is a Baptist minister and heads her management team.)
“Jessica wasn’t very athletic,” says Tina. “In elementary school, she would have to run track-and-field races. She’d always come in last place.”
But after a few weeks of working out and sticking to the strict, mostly protein Atkins diet, Jessica started getting the hang of it. Says Tina: “It’s built up her endurance so she can sing and dance at the same time. The other night we went to ’Nsync’s show—they’re unbelievable, singing and dancing like they’re running a football field. To do both, you’ve got to be in tremendous shape. That’s been her motivation.”
—Additional reporting by Mara Reinstein and Linda Friedman
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