NEED TO KNOW
Lizzo is opening up about her weight loss journey — as well as her concerns with the current state of weight-loss culture.
The singer, 37, explored her thoughts in a candid personal essay published on Substack on Sunday, Nov 23, titled, “Why is everybody losing weight and what do we do? Sincerely, a person who’s lost weight.”
In the piece, Lizzo — who shared that she currently weighs over 200 lbs. and is “still a proud big girl — said she feels as though plus-size women are becoming “erased” in the age of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic.
“So here we are halfway through the decade, where extended sizes are being magically erased from websites. Plus-sized models are no longer getting booked for modeling gigs. And all of our big girls are not-so-big anymore,” she reflected, adding, “We have a lot of work to do, to undo the effects of the Ozempic boom.”
However, the Grammy winner also acknowledged that conversations around weight loss are not simple, noting that she herself was partly motivated to lose weight because she was “sick and tired” of her identity being “overshadowed” by her weight.
“People could not see my talent as a musician because they were too busy accusing me of making ‘being fat’ my whole personality,” she wrote. “I had to actively work against ‘mammy’ tropes by being hypersexual and vulgar because being a mammy by definition is being desexualized.”
“And that’s the reality that nobody wants to talk about,” she continued. “We’re in an era where the bigger girls are getting smaller because they’re tired of being judged.”
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The singer also revealed that she began losing weight in the fall of 2023 during a period of severe depression, revealing that she was “deeply suicidal” at the time. However, she wrote that she decided to “turn my extreme inaction into action.”
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“The old me would tend to binge when sad and depressed. I would order hundreds of dollars of food delivery and eat everything until my stomach felt like it would explode. But this time I just didn’t feel like doing that,” she continued.
Lizzo said she started doing Pilates to “process my pain through my body.” She also began therapy, where she wrote that she came to realize that she had been using her weight as a “protective shield” and she “wanted to let-it-the-f— go.”
The musician concluded her essay by calling for more nuanced conversations and discussions within the body positivity movement in which “we release ourselves from the illusion that there is only good and bad.”
“I want us to allow the body positive movement to expand and grow far away from the commercial slop it’s become. Because movements move,” she added.
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