Cyndi Lauper’s unusual diet that led to excruciatingly painful illness

Singer Cyndi Lauper opened up on a condition which “killed her” as she consumed too much of one superfood. The 71-year-old perfromer, from New York, admitted that she once ate too much spinach and the vegetable did not grant her the health benefits that she expected.

Instead, she found herself suffering from kidney stones – an extremely painful condition that can lead to kidney infections or the kidney not working properly if left untreated.

Speaking to Jessie and Lennie Ware on the Table Manners podcast, the singer shared: “I tried to be vegan. Every day [I ate] spinach, every meal, spinach, and I wound up having kidney stones, and they killed me.”

Lennie asked: “Do you get kidney stones from spinach?” To which Cyndi replied: “Yes, it has a chemical in it. If you eat too much of this kind of thing, and you’re prone to that… You can develop kidney stones. So I stopped that.”

The Girls Just Want To Have Fun star also touched on her fitness routine, saying: “I’ve been doing PT every morning. It’s physical therapy which means [working] all the little muscles really slow.

“Then after you’re done with that, it’s supposed to move on to weights. Then after the weights, you want to do some yoga. And then you gotta do your voice and incorporate the voice into the routine.”

The star also shared that she would “never go to a desert island”, saying: “First of all, I’m allergic to the sun. I’m allergic to the cold. I’m not gonna sit in the sun. I get wrinkles.”

It’s not the first time that Cyndi has dealth with a painful condition. She was diagnosed with plaque psoriasis in 2010, but struggled for years before finding a specialist.

According to the NHS, the symptoms of the condition are dry skin lesions, known as plaques, covered in scales. They normally appear on your elbows, knees, scalp and lower back, but can appear anywhere on your body and the plaques can be itchy or sore, or both.

Explaining how it impacted her, the singer said: “When psoriasis gets really bad, it’s really hard to get up again.” At one point her psoriasis covered most of her body as Cyndi admitted: “It looked like someone threw boiling water on me.”

At one point, Cyndi was left bedridden and covered in a rash due to her psoriasis. “It was so bad, I felt like the Elephant Man,” she said. “My immune system got a little wacky, and it took my strength away. My skin was so inflamed, it could not regulate hot and cold, so I had the chills all the time.”