Taylor Lautner Was Close To Letting Body Dysmorphia Ruin His Life

Taylor Lautner was battling a serious case of body dysmorphia that made him so obsessed with his body, nothing else mattered.

The actor, 30 has always been known for his great physique. Even a teenager in the Twilight film franchise, Taylor was in phenomenal shape and while we were all fawning over him for that, he was struggling in silence over his body never being good enough.

The Michigan native was candid on his podcast The Squeeze. He admitted that he spent a lot of time being too invested in his physical looks. “You need to get to a place where you realize that how your body and your body looks doesn't say anything about you as a person, because there's a flip side too,” he says of what happened to him.

The actor believes that being physically fit is great but that mental health should be first in line. We often forget that it is a muscle as well.

“Your body can be unbelievable, you can be ripped, shredded, whatever, you can lose weight, you can put on muscle, and if you're not healthy mentally, then that's all for nothing because that can work against you,' pointed out the Abducted actor.

He sees the two sides to it and acknowledges that it’s confusing and challenging at times because he felt extremely confident when he was “ripped” but his mental health wasn’t where it needed to be.

“There's two totally different sides to it, and I think that was the thing I needed to learn, because for so long, I told myself, if I get my body back to where I want it to be, then I'm going to be happy again.”

The actor has since moved past constantly criticizing his body and focused on making sure his mind and body were actually working together. “Value does not come in what you look like when you look at yourself in the mirror.” He vowed to never fall into that trap again.

Taylor isn’t the only actor from the Twilight film series to share their journey on mental health. Anna Kendrick who had a minor role in the film recently appeared on Dax Shepherd’s podcast, Armchair Expert where she revealed that therapy has been her saving grace after a toxic and abusive relationship.

The actress explained that she was in a long-term relationship with someone she didn’t name who was not good to her. “I was with someone — this was somebody I lived with, for all intents and purposes my husband. We had embryos together, this was my person.’”

She went on to share at “about six years in, about somewhere around there, I remember telling my brother, when things had first kind of gone down, ‘I’m living with a stranger. Like, I don’t know what’s happening.’”

Her ex was toxic and cheating on her and admittedly in love with someone else. They ended up going to therapy but soon Anna sought out individual therapy.

“I ended up going down to just one therapist eventually and I’m totally obsessed with her…but what she did teach me to do was look at my own experience and decide what I wanted and start drawing boundaries.

“And that was really scary and really hard but that is what ended the relationship.”