JoJo reveals she was put on 500-calorie a day diet as a teenager

Popstar JoJo has opened up about the extreme pressure she came under to lose weight as a teenager.

In an interview with Uproxx, the singer, who rose to fame with hit 2004 track 'Get Out' - making her the youngest solo artist ever to reach Number One on the Billboard Mainstream Top 40 - said her label refused to release her music "because of the way I looked."

JoJo described one particular exchange with her record label president.

"When I was 18, I remember being sat down in the Blackground office and the president of the label being like, ‘We just want you to look as healthy as possible.' And I was like, ‘I'm actually the picture of health. I look like a healthy girl who eats and is active. I don't think this is about my health.'"

Under pressure from the label, JoJo revealed a nutritionist put her on a 500-calorie a day diet and gave her injections to suppress her appetite.

"I ended up working with a nutritionist who had me on a 500-calorie diet a day" she said, "I was taking these injections that make you have no appetite. I was like, 'Let me see how thin I could become because maybe then they will put out an album. Maybe I'm so disgusting that nobody wants to see me in the video and they can't even look at me.' That's really what I thought."

NHS guidelines state the recommended daily calorie intake for an 18-year-old girl is around 2,400 calories per day.

JoJo says she also turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with her career being frozen by the label. She previously told People that both her parents both struggled with alcohol addiction.

“For a while, I coped by drinking too much. I wanted to get out of my mind. I wanted to stop picking myself apart.

"I just wanted to feel good, to chase that high. I wanted to stop worrying about my career. And when you get out of your mind, when you get to that point when you black out, you don’t give a s*** about anything.”

Now 29, JoJo is enjoying a career resurgence. In January she won her very first Grammy Award for Best R&B song, a moment her fans called 'long overdue.'