It’s 6:30 a.m. and Britney Spears is blotting the grease from a slice of pizza and lifting it to her mouth. Before taking a bite, she groans and throws it away, disgusted with herself.

This kind of behavior, witnessed the morning after her disastrous performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sept. 9, is typical of Britney’s troubled relationship with food, say her friends, who claim that she is battling secret food demons that are leading her toward a potentially deadly descent into starvation.

“Britney told me, ‘I’ll starve myself because I’m fat,’” says Britney’s pal. “She kept telling me she thought she was fat and disgusting.” Britney seems to have deep-rooted issues with food and is haunted by a need to starve herself and then binge-eat, sources say.

According to one insider, Britney is addicted to diet pills that, when combined with her excessive intake of caffeine from large amounts of coffee and Red Bull, could lead to serious health problems.

Britney’s ex-employee says, “Brit’s got a serious issue with food and a serious eating disorder. Brit has been taking weight-loss pills called Stacker 2, drinking Red Bull and coffee and working out — she’s going to pass out from all the caffeine, or something worse could happen, like her heart stops.”

A Britney insider says, “Britney’s thrown up when she eats too much, like burgers and fries or whatever she can get her hands on. It gets worse when she is under a lot of stress.” A British newspaper reported on Sept. 17 that Britney has been banned from the Chateau Marmont hotel in L.A. after guests complained that she smeared food on her face.

Friends are concerned. “We couldn’t get her to eat anything and if she did, she obsessed about the calories,” says one. “She has mystery trips to the bathroom to clear her head but it’s all very weird.”

A former employee of Britney reveals that she loves traditional Southern dishes, like fried chicken, mac and cheese and grits, with not a lot of fruit and vegetables, which might explain Britney’s often spotty complexion.

Britney’s confidante Alli Sims was trying to get her to eat the morning after her VMAs catastrophe, says a friend of Brit’s brother Bryan, but Britney was so shocked at how she looked on stage — calling herself a “fat pig” — that she didn’t want to eat. However, coinciding with Britney’s dangerous eating patterns is an obsessive exercise regime.

A pal says. “She’s got no self-control one minute, but the next she’s restricting her diet to under 500 calories a day and doing thousands of stomach crunches.”

Another friend says that Britney will try anything to drop weight, including steam rooms. “She’ll go to any lengths to have her old body back and doesn’t care how much she’s going to hurt herself.”

When Brit has shopped for clothes in the past she asks for the wrong sizes and then the salesgirls are too embarrassed to tell her that she isn’t a size 0 anymore, a source explains.

“It’s awkward and embarrassing to have to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re about 6 sizes off,’” says the source. “She doesn’t have the rock-hard abs she had when she was 17. When she dresses she gets upset because nothing fits; she thinks she’s much thinner than she really is.”

A pal of Britney says that Britney “is taking her frustration out on her diet. It’s the only thing she can control. She’s sick of everyone, including Kevin, calling her a fat pig.

She believes she is fat and unlovable and that until she gets her weight under control nobody will love her. Kevin made a snarky comment the other day at the lawyers’ office that her boys are going to grow up and think she’s let herself go. It hit her hard.â€? [via]