In a 2010 interview with New York magazine, a self-confident Lady Gaga declared,

I believe that everyone can do what I'm doing. Everyone can access the parts of themselves that are great. I'm just a girl from New York City who decided to do this, after all. Rule the world! What's life worth living if you don't rule it?

But two years later, a much less confident and vulnerable Lady Gaga admitted to a group of Long Island high school students that she's struggled with bulimia since she was a teenager. Gaga admitted,

I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I'm not that confident. I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina, but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night. I used to come home and say, "Dad, why do you always give us this food? I need to be thin." And he'd say, "Eat your spaghetti …." It's really hard …. It made my voice bad, so I had to stop. The acid on your vocal cords … it's very bad.

Lady Gaga confessed that she still struggles to maintain her weight and feel good about her body:

Weight is still a struggle. Every video I'm in, every magazine cover, they stretch you—they make you perfect. It's not real life. I'm gonna say this about girls: The dieting has got to stop. Everyone just knock it off. Because at the end of the day, it's affecting kids your age—and it's making girls sick.