Demi Moore Shares Details About Her Diet and Favorite Splurge (Exclusive)

At this stage of her life, Demi Moore has perfected what wellness means to her.

For years, The Substance star, 62, who graces the cover of PEOPLE’s World’s Most Beautiful issue, “tortured” her body through intense diet and exercise for a string of blockbuster hits in the 90s, including Ghost, Indecent Proposal, Striptease and G.I. Jane. “I was so harsh and had a much more antagonistic relationship with my body. And straight up, I was really just punishing myself,” she tells the magazine in this week’s issue. “And in this desire to dominate it versus now, I have a much more kind of intuitive, relaxed, trusting relationship with my body.”

After wrapping 1997’s G.I. Jane, Moore, who shares three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, with ex-husband Bruce Willis, recalls “just asking to be my natural size because I didn’t know what it was anymore,” she says. “I had three pregnancies. I had done all of this diet and exercise and controlled and changed it. And I didn’t know. So I just let go.”

Her “moment of surrender” came when she “stopped trying to control my food and I really understood what it meant to be in acceptance of my body as it is, even though it’s not the body I wanted,” she adds. “I really let go.”

For more of Moore’s exclusive interview and photos, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.

These days, Moore, who says she’s about 40 lbs. lighter than when she played Lieutenant Jordan O’Neill in the military film, trusts her body “when it tells me it needs something to eat, that it’s thirsty. I listen to my body and I have a lot less fear. When I was younger, I felt like my body was betraying me. And so I then just tried to control it. And now I don’t operate from that place. It’s a much more aligned relationship.”

She begins each day “anchoring with a short meditation, journaling. And overall I like really nutrient-dense food. I don’t eat meat. I do eat eggs. But I think a big part of wellness is really inside out,” she adds. “And I’ve come to realize how important sleep is. I mean, I’m not perfect. I still do drink Red Bull. I do love it. But not many. One.”

When it comes to embracing aging in Hollywood, Moore says the biggest thing “is really being in acceptance of who we are, as we are, at whatever moment that is,” she says. “I have a greater appreciation for all that my body has been through that brought me to now. Like how incredible that my body grew three human beings and I have overall really incredible health.”

That doesn’t mean “sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t go, ‘Oh God, I look old,’ or ‘Oh, my face is falling,’ I do,” she adds. “But at the same time I can accept that that is where I’m at today and know the difference is that doesn’t define my value or who I am.”