At 61, Demi Moore Explains Why She No Longer Works Out

“I put so much pressure on myself,” she continued. “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.”

In retrospect, she can see how dangerous the situation was, but at the time, the blinders were up. “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.”

She changed her routine

Now, Moore doesn’t often talk about working out. However, in 2019, she shared on Instagram that she began exercising at home for the first time in four years with The Mirror (now Lululemon Studio). “Five min at level one that’s doable after not working out for over four years right? I am stalling!” she wrote.

The workout hiatus seems like it may have stemmed from her “obsession” with working out, as described in her memoir, per People. It all began when she played a naval lawyer in the 1992 film A Few Good Men. “I didn’t feel like I could stop exercising,” she wrote. “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 over the next five years. I never dared let up.”

She gave up working out after G.I. Jane

The military film required her to “bulk up enormously,” she wrote, and it was when the work wrapped that she decided not to let the pendulum swing back to slimming down. “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,” Moore wrote. “I had an epiphany in the shower one day: I just need to be my natural size.”

And with that, she stopped. “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 wrote. “I started by giving up hard exercise. I never went back into the gym in the house … The room it occupied is now my office.”

Now, she is focused on herself

Moore has made it a goal of hers to unlink herself from the way others perceive her—and to sit in the discomfort of it all if and when it arises. She calls it being “emotionally sober,” which impacts “the quality of how I interact with people, my ability to show up for others,” she recently 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. I can actually just go: ‘Oh, wow. Isn’t that interesting? I’m a little uncomfortable right now.’”