Yet, Amy Winehouse’s eating disorder wasn’t simply "yet another bad decision." The environmental and genetic factors at play in Winehouse’s childhood and adolescence put her at extremely high risk for developing an eating disorder, and the lack of early intervention, education, and stable guidance meant that the disease was able to firmly take root and flourish as she was put in higher- and higher-stress situations. An interview with her brother Alex in the Guardian confirms the known-but-not-discussed quality of Amy’s bulimia: "We all knew she was doing it, but it's almost impossible especially if you're not talking about it. This "petiteness" was not natural it was fought for.īut to anyone other than Amy, it was easy to overlook and intimidating to address.
AMY WINEHOUSE NO MAKEUP FULL
Early videos of her performing for industry folks as an 18- or 19-year-old show her with broad shoulders, a heavy chest, full thighs and torso-generally an "average-sized" woman with a solid frame. Amy wasn’t always petite, and would likely not have been referred to that way even at the time she began performing in clubs and signed a record deal. When Amy suffers and survives her first overdose, a close acquaintance summarizes the urgings of a doctor and those around her to explain that a "petite" young girl cannot maintain the level of drug and alcohol abuse that led to the overdose. These facts make it very easy for the friends, family, and colleagues of those with an eating disorder to overlook the disease, as the footage and interviews we see in Amy remind us. Bingeing, purging, or starving are highly unlikely to put you into debt, and leave you unintoxicated and able to carry out the tasks of a job, and tend to the demands of a relationship and daily chores of life. The same goes of those with anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and purging disorder. A person with bulimia nervosa can carry on bingeing and purging while otherwise maintaining a high level of functionality. She says that when Amy told her father, Mitch Winehouse, as well, he also dismissed it.Įating disorders, for the most part, are a highly contained and easily managed means of utterly ruining oneself. She muses that she essentially ignored the statement and forgot about it, thinking it was a silly teen girl activity that Amy would soon grow out of. =-=-=-The film avoids editorializing at this point or any other-the format, consistent with Kapadia’s earlier, also critically-acclaimed documentary, Senna, involves audio interviews and raw footage, but no commentary-yet no editorializing is required in order for a viewer to feel distraught-the next few sentences to come out of Janis’s mouth are enough. In a voiceover during this sequence, the singer’s mother Janis Winehouse recounts the moment a young Amy tells her mother about discovering a great new "diet"-eating and then vomiting-that allows her to eat without gaining weight. A teenaged Winehouse, snacking with her friends, laments between mouthfuls that she’s a pig and she cannot help herself.
Amy Winehouse learned those ugly rules of womanhood early, as footage from Asif Kapadia’s devastating, much-praised documentary Amy reveals.