In her new movie The Substance, Demi Moore plays a famous aerobics instructor, Elisabeth Sparkle, who’s fired on her 50th birthday. She’s offered a substance that transforms her into an enhanced version of herself, and things get seriously wild from there. (The Substance is now streaming on Mubi.)
It’s a plot that Demi herself—who has been grappling with Hollywood’s unrealistic beauty standards for over four decades—can connect with.
“I think from a human point, I relate, but I’m not Elisabeth,” Demi told the Los Angeles Times. “There are different interpretations that she could have had in responding to [being fired], although we wouldn’t have had the same movie.”
While promoting her movie, the 61-year-old has opened up about her own approach to wellness, adding that at times in the past, she didn’t approach fitness in the healthiest way. Here’s what she’s shared about her workout routine—and why she no longer does “hard exercise.”
Demi felt ‘pressure’ to lose weight postpartum.
Demi, a mom of three, filmed her iconic 1993 movie Indecent Proposal after having her second daughter, Scout. But the process wasn’t easy: Demi was stressed about losing weight postpartum and pushed herself too hard.
“I put so much pressure on myself,” she told CBS Sunday Morning on September 22. “I did have experiences of being told to lose weight. And all of those, while they may have been embarrassing and humiliating, it’s what I did to myself because of that.”
Scout was five or six months old when Demi was shooting Indecent Proposal, she said. “So, I was feeding her through the night, getting up in the dark with a trainer, with headlamp, biking all the way to Paramount, wherever, 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,” she said, noting that this would sometimes equate to 60 miles of biking a day. “Even just the idea of, like, what I did to my body, it’s, like, so crazy, so ridiculous.”
Now, Demi said she’s not thrilled she did that. “You look back and you kinda go, ‘Did it really matter that much?’ Probably not,” she said. “But at the time, I made it mean everything.”
What is Demi Moore’s exercise routine?
Demi has shared little snippets here and there of her workout routine. In 2019, she posted a video on Instagram doing exercises with the help of the Mirror (now known as Lululemon Studio). She’s also been spotted attending Pilates classes with her daughters.
“Five min at level one that’s doable after not working out for over four years right? I am stalling!” she wrote.
But in the 90s, Demi developed an “obsession” over her appearance for movies. It began with her 1992 film A Few Good Men, where she played a naval lawyer.
“I didn’t feel like I could stop exercising,” Demi wrote in her 2019 memoir Inside Out. “It was my job to fit into that unforgiving military uniform I’d be wearing in two months in ‘A Few Good Men.’ Getting in shape for that movie launched the obsession with working out that would consume me.”
After five years, Demi decided to ease up on working out regularly.
“I added into my daily prayer a new mantra: to have the courage to be seen without padding or protection. I couldn’t go on fighting my body and my weight; I had to make peace,” she added. “I started by giving up hard exercise. I never went back into the gym in the house. Never. The room it occupied is now my office.”
She gave up the gym after filming ‘G.I. Jane.’
After shooting 1997’s G.I. Jane, Demi broke her patterned of disordered exercise. She was “bulking up enormously” for her role as a military officer; after filming was done, she weighed more than her usual, but she decided she had enough.
“My usual reaction would have been to start starving myself again, to begin an exercise regime designed to reduce the bulk, but I did neither. I had reached my limit,” she wrote in her memoir. “When I got home to Idaho, I had an epiphany in the shower one day: I just need to be my natural size.”
In September, Demi said she “really experienced the gift of surrender.”
“I was so kind of worn down in this battle that I had been in that I finally surrendered,” she told The New York Times. “I just started to ask to be my natural size because I didn’t know what it was. I literally couldn’t go in a gym. I couldn’t control food in that way.”
She lost 20 pounds during a battle with shingles.
But that isn’t the only time Demi has opened up about her health. While filming The Substance, the actress contracted shingles, a “painful rash illness,” caused by the reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“To give you an idea of the intensity, my first week that I actually had off, where it was just Margaret working, I got shingles,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “And I then lost, like, 20 pounds.”
Her co-star Margaret Qualley even got “crazy acne” due to the stress of filming, with Demi adding that they “put it all on the table” while making the movie.
Now, she’s more focused on self-confidence.
After decades in Hollywood, Demi now feels “emotionally sober,” which impacts “the quality of how I interact with people, my ability to show up for others,” she told The New York Times.
“That’s all within my emotional sobriety… I can go into a room, a gathering, and if I’m uncomfortable, I don’t need to try to take the edge off it,” she continued. “I can actually just go: ‘Oh, wow. Isn’t that interesting? I’m a little uncomfortable right now.’”
Now, she’s focused on appreciating what’s in front of her rather than chasing some ideal of perfection.
“That deep reminder of appreciating who you are, as you are, where you are, just resonated more as [filming The Substance] went along,” she says. “And not just the external. Really, all of those internal things of who we are that we often can overlook. And the journey of what it’s taken to get where you are.”
Korin Miller is a freelance writer specializing in general wellness, sexual health and relationships, and lifestyle trends, with work appearing in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Self, Glamour, and more. She has a master’s degree from American University, lives by the beach, and hopes to own a teacup pig and taco truck one day.
