Demi Moore Recalls Intense ‘Pressure’ She Put on Herself to Lose Weight After Second Pregnancy

While appearing on CBS Sunday Morning, the 61-year-old actress appeared talked about the “crazy” things she put her body through to submit to beauty standards at the time.

“I put so much pressure on myself,” Moore told host Tracy Smith. “And I did have experiences of being told to lose weight and all of those [things]. While they may have been embarrassing and humiliating, it’s what I did to myself because of that.”

Moore revealed that she began shooting Indecent Proposal just months after her second daughter, Scout Willis, was born in 1991. To lose the pregnancy weight, she would ride a bike to and from work every day — about 60 miles.

“I think [Scout] was, like, five or six months old when we were shooting,” she explained. “I was feeding her through the night, getting up in the dark with a trainer with a headlamp, biking all the way to Paramount, even on location where we were shooting, then shooting a full day which is usually a 12-hour day and then starting all over again.”

“Even just the idea of what I did to my body; it’s like so crazy, so ridiculous,” she continued. “But you look back and you kind of go, ‘Did it really matter that much?’ Probably not, but at the time I made it mean everything.”

Today, Moore said her self-image “fluctuates” but she’s in a much better place mentally.

“Some days I look and I’m like, ‘Wow that’s pretty good,’ and some days I catch myself dissecting, hyper-focusing on things that I don’t like,” Moore said. “The difference is now, I can catch myself. I can go, ‘Yep, I don’t like that loose skin but you know, it is what it is. So I’m going to make the best of what is as opposed to chasing what isn’t.'”

In Moore’s latest film, The Substance, she explores that idea of self-image and aging, playing Elizabeth Sparkle, a celebrity who tries a black-market drug to create a younger version of herself named Sue, played by Margaret Qualley.

Speaking to People at the film’s premiere earlier this month, Moore said she hopes viewers are more gentle on themselves after watching the thriller.

“I mean, I certainly hope that not just for women, but for men and women alike, that they walk away finding a little bit more gentility towards themselves. A little bit more compassion,” she said.

Her daughters, Scout, Rumer and Tallulah, whom she shares with ex, Bruce Willis, also spoke with the outlet about how their mom’s view of beauty and body image have influenced their own.

“I think my mom has always been such a model of working on feeling good from the inside because I think there are people who are so exquisitely beautiful from the outside, who still feel so insecure and are in so much pain,” Scout. “So I think she fostered in all of us a real desire to just feel beautiful, feel sexy, feel embodied.”