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Lizzo opens up about her weight loss journey and her concerns about the current state of weight loss culture.
The 37-year-old singer explored her thoughts in a candid personal essay titled “Why is everyone losing weight? What should we do? From the heart as someone who has lost weight,” published on Substack on Sunday, Nov. 23.
In the article, Lizzo revealed that she currently weighs over 200 pounds. “I’m still a proud big girl,” she said, adding that she feels like plus-size women are being “erased” in the age of weight loss drugs like Ozempic.
“We’re halfway through the decade and enlarged sizes are magically being erased from websites. Plus-size models are no longer being booked for modeling jobs. And all of our big girls aren’t that big anymore,” she reflects, adding, “We have a lot of work to do to reverse the effects of the Ozempic boom.”
But the Grammy winner also acknowledged that conversations around weight loss aren’t simple, noting that part of her motivation for losing weight was because she was “tired” of her identity being “shadowed” by her weight.
“People didn’t understand my talent as a musician because they were too busy accusing me of being ‘fat’ my whole person,” she wrote. “Being a mom by definition means being desexualized, so I had to actively counter the ‘mom’ trope by being overly sexual and vulgar.”
“And that’s the reality that no one wants to talk about,” she continued. “We’re in a time where big girls are getting smaller because they’re tired of being judged.”
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The singer also revealed that she started losing weight in the fall of 2023 during a period of severe depression, revealing that she had “severe suicidal thoughts” at the time. However, she wrote that she was determined to “turn my extreme inaction into action.”
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“In the past, when I was sad and depressed, I would tend to binge-drink and binge-eat. I would spend hundreds of dollars on food and eat everything until I felt like I was going to explode. But this time, I didn’t feel that way,” she continued.
Lizzo said she started doing Pilates to “process pain throughout my body.” She also began therapy, where she wrote that she realized she had been using her weight as a “shield to protect herself” and “wanted to let that go.”
The musician concluded his essay by calling for more nuanced conversations and debates within the body positivity movement, which “frees us from the illusion that there is only good and bad.”
“I want the body positivity movement to be able to expand and grow far from the commercial slant, because movements move,” she added.
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