Former Disney Channel star Bella Thorne is out promoting her new film, Midnight Sun, with co-star Patrick Schwarzenegger, and the 21-year-old has been revealing surprising health secrets. It comes as no shock that filming in Canada for four months made her really, truly, deeply appreciate a good night’s sleep. The crew worked all night in temperatures reaching 20 degrees below freezing on the arduous project, and Bella did all her own stunts. But the big reveal came when Bella talked about why she chooses weights over cardio for exercise.
Working on Midnight Sun at the beginning of last year discouraged her from working out. “Then I started another project and got lazy,” Bella told Shape magazine. “But I recently decided it’s time to go back to the gym. I get stressed and antsy when I don’t go.
“I won’t do cardio—because it makes me lose too much weight, and my boobs are always the first thing to go—but I will do a lot of weight lifting, boxing, Pilates, and hot yoga,” she said.
Her body sends her important messages she can’t ignore when she is falling behind on restorative sleep.
“When I’m overtired, my psoriasis and acne are bad, I get migraines and sore eyes, I forget my lines, and my hands shake a lot,” Bella said. “Those are tells that I need some sleep. I’m not a believer in sleeping pills, so I need to start mentally winding down earlier so I can calm and ease my mind.”
Even though Bella recognizes the importance of sleep, she has difficulty making up for lost down time.
“Sleep is so important, and yet I keep skipping it. I can never catch up. The problem is that my creative hours are from 9 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and then I often need to get up for work at 4:30. By the time I get home—especially if I’ve been filming an intense scene or had coffee—I’m jittery and exhausted,” Bella said. “I’m lucky that I have one of those brains that always allows me to take more on. But while it makes for a great work ethic, it gets me in trouble.”
Getting back to the gym and making time for healing sleep are just a few of the goals the actress has set for herself this year. One is promoting the newly released Midnight Sun (a doomed, innocent romance about an 18-year-old girl stricken with a rare condition that forces her to live her life away from the sun). Another is planning a tour with her band.
Read More and find out why Bella is shifting from her wild child past to figuring out who she really wants to be in this Shape interview.
