The country music icon spent years fighting her own reflection. At 60, she has finally stopped.
Shania Twain recently opened up about her tumultuous relationship with her body image, revealing that menopause, often dreaded by women, became the unexpected key to her freedom. The five-time Grammy winner admitted that she once did “very unhealthy things” to maintain her weight, pushing herself to the point of malnourishment during a Las Vegas residency in 2019.
During that difficult period, Twain couldn’t even face her own mirror. “I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. I hated my body,” she recalled. Her body was changing in ways her old routines couldn’t fix. Bloating set in. The pounds stopped responding. So she worked harder and ate less, a punishing cycle that backfired completely.
“I was working my body more than I was feeding it to keep up with the strain,” she said. The relentless pursuit of “being thinner” left her malnourished and worsened an onstage thigh injury that required her to be carried off stage.
Then something unexpected happened. The same hormonal shift that stripped away her sense of control taught her something far more valuable.
“Menopause has been very good for me because I’ve learned that some things you cannot control,” Twain explained. That single realization cracked open a new way of seeing herself.
Now the woman who couldn’t stand her own reflection has completely reversed course. “Bring on the mirrors, I’m going to look at myself all day long!” she says with a laugh.
Twain’s transformation didn’t happen overnight. She previously posed nude for her “Queen of Me” album cover at 57—a moment she calls a “celebration” of being exactly who she is. Her advice to other women navigating aging is characteristically direct: love yourself now because fear is the only thing truly standing in your way.
The singer is currently preparing to release her seventh studio album while also producing a biopic about her life. But her most powerful work may simply be showing millions of women that menopause isn’t an ending. It can be a beginning.
