Demi Lovato's Rules For Vanity Fair Shoot: 'No Makeup, No Clothes, No Retouching'

Earlier this week, Demi Lovato was photographed by Vanity Fair’s Patrick Ecclesine to promote her upcoming album, Confident. But this wasn’t your typical celebrity photo shoot. No, Lovato gave Ecclesine three rules to work by:

No makeup.
No clothes.
No retouching.

Not exactly the rules for Fight Club, but empowering nonetheless. The resulting photos were published Friday, and are certainly nice (though dimly lit), but the real takeaway from the shoot is a video in which she explains her decisions to VF. In it, she discusses her struggles with body image—including her past eating disorders.

Says Lovato:

“And I thought there was something incredible about the idea of no makeup whatsoever, no clothes, and no retouching. I would have never thought that I would have ever gotten to a place in my life where could feel comfortable doing that.”

She continues:

“In the past I suffered from eating disorders, and I basically went from hating every single inch of my body to working on myself and trying to figure out ways to love myself, love the skin that I’m in. I learned, after working very hard on my spirituality, my soul, and my body, I learned tat you can get to a place where I love the skin I’m in. And I’m excited to share that with the world.”

You can watch the full video and take a look at all her photos on Vanity Fair. Confident will be released October 16, and I expect you’ll be hearing her use that word a whole lot between now and then.