Singer JoJo says she was put on a 500-calorie a day diet at 18-years-old

Singer JoJo was just 13 when her debut single Leave (Get Out) topped the charts in 2004 but now the star has revealed the dark side to fame as she's claimed her former record label put her on an extreme diet later on in her career.

The US star, real name Joanna Levesque, has said her label at the time - Blackground - set her up with a nutritionist when she was 18 years old with one boss telling her they "wanted her to look as healthy as possible".

After her first two albums, 2004's JoJo and 2006's The High Road, she believed her label refused to release her third album "because of the way [she] looked".

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In a video interview with Uproxx the 29-year-old shared: "I ended up working with a nutritionist who had me on a 500-calorie diet a day. 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."

The Too Little Too Late hitmaker went on to divulge that she developed addiction issues as she "wanted to stop worrying about [her] career".

JoJo has previously discussed her parents' struggles with alcohol abuse telling People how it inspired her third album, which was released in 2016, Mad Love.

It came after she was eventually freed from her contract with the record label in 2014, one year after filing a lawsuit against Blackground and imprint Da Family Records.

JoJo's career hit a major milestone back in January when she picked up a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song for her collaboration with PJ Morton, Say So.

It marked the first win for the singer, as well as her first ever nomination.