Facing up to a year in jail, a candid Nicole Richie opens up about those eating-disorder rumors and her drug use in Nylon’s August issue.

Nicole Richie on her weight and anorexic rumors: “It’s really sad how obsessed America is with weight. It’s sick,” Richie, who has vehemently denied having an eating disorder, tells the magazine.

“I’ve never gone a day without putting food in my mouth. I’ve never sewn my mouth shut. I’ve never gone on a liquid diet. So I want to know why I’m the face for a problem.”

Still, the 5-foot-1 Richie, who, according to a police report, weighed just 85 pounds at the time of her arrest, has sought help to gain weight.

On that infamous e-mail: Richie was widely criticized for an e-mail invitation to a May 27 party in L.A. “Let’s glorify this day in your sluttiest tops and your tightest pair of Tsubi jeans / Even though we have no f_king clue what Memorial Day really means!!” she wrote, adding, “No girls over 100 pounds allowed!”

“That f_king e-mail rhymed!” she tells Nylon, dismissing it as “sarcastic.” “I don’t think anyone thinks of me as a very serious person,” she says. “I’m on a comedy show. What do you expect from me?”

Nicole Richie on her drug past: In 2003, Richie entered rehab following a heroin-possession arrest. “When I pictured heroin, I pictured some crazy crackhead with no shoes under a bridge,” she says in the interview. “You never think that is going to be you.

And it never was me. I was never under a bridge, and I always had shoes.” But Richie, who admitted to taking a Vicodin and smoking pot after being stopped driving the wrong way on a California freeway in December, says the road to heroin was gradual.

“I just started off with marijuana, graduated to coke, then to prescription pills, and then someone was just like, ‘Do you want to try it?’” [via]