Jesy Nelson realised she had to quit Little Mix when she reached her "breaking point" while shooting the music video for Sweet Melody.
In November, it was revealed that the singer would be taking an extended break from the girl group, and the following month, she announced that she was quitting the band, citing her mental health as one of her reasons for leaving.
In her first solo interview for the cover of U.K. Cosmopolitan magazine, Jesy revealed that the "breaking point" came when they filmed the video and she had a panic attack as she wasn't happy with how she looked, even though she'd put herself on "an extreme diet" for two weeks before the shoot in an effort to lose the weight she'd put on during lockdown.
"Whenever we had a music video, I put an enormous amount of pressure on myself to try and lose weight. I have a fear of looking back on the camera. If I don't like what I see, I find it so hard to be in front of the camera and feel amazing and perform," she explained. "On the day of the Sweet Melody video I had a panic attack on set because I didn't look how I wanted to look and I found it so hard to just be happy and enjoy myself.
"There's a scene in Sweet Melody I'm not in, because that's when I had a panic attack and broke down. I was like, 'I just want to go home.' I was sobbing in the dressing room. Someone really close to me said, 'This has got to stop. You can't keep doing this to yourself. You're going to end up where you were before.'"
She realised that she needed to put her mental health first otherwise she would have ended up back where she was around 2013, when online abuse from trolls drove her to attempt suicide.
"For so long, I worried about others and letting people down. The only person I should have been trying to make happy was myself, and I wasn't doing that. I needed to do it for my mental health, because I know I would have ended up back where I was five years ago, and that's scary," she confessed.
Her former bandmates Perrie Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall released their first song as a trio, Confetti, last week.
