Lizzo has described the resentment she felt being ‘overshadowed’ by her ‘fatness’ in a candid new post reflecting on her weight loss journey.
The Good As Hell songstress, 37, has dramatically slimmed down in recent years, and recently announced she had achieved her goal weight.
Yet after years of embracing her role as the face of the body positivity movement, Lizzo struggled to break free of being seen as more than just her weight.
In her very first Substack post, entitled ‘Why is everybody losing weight and what do we do? Sincerely, a person who’s lost weight’, Lizzo admitted she grew bitter being synonymous with the size of her body.
‘I was sick and tired of my identity being overshadowed by my fatness. People could not see my talent as a musician because they were too busy accusing me of making “being fat” my whole personality,’ she said.
Yet it was a role Lizzo had long embraced, as she earlier described in her essay defiantly hitting back at ‘obnoxious memes’.
Lizzo has described the resentment she felt being ‘overshadowed’ by her ‘fatness’ in a candid new post reflecting on her weight loss journey; pictured earlier this month
The Juice songstress, 37, has dramatically slimmed down in recent years, and recently announced she had achieved her goal weight; pictured L 2023
‘The way I’ve been treated as a public figure since I was introduced to the world as a confident, body positive figure has been borderline emotional abuse. And it’s simply because of my weight.
‘Nevertheless, I made it work for me. I trolled the hell out of those obnoxious memes. I was self-aware that I was the butt of every fat joke on the Internet.
‘And yet I continued to be who I am, because it’s the only thing I know how to be. And even in being myself, no one really believed it. I discovered that people thought that I was being “performative”. Performing being body positive when I was the first body positive musician to become mainstream doesn’t even make sense.’
At first, Lizzo did not intend to lose weight.
Her mental health deteriorated as she found herself hit with lawsuits by former team members. Three back-up dancers accused her of sexual harassment, fat shaming and a hostile work environment while a former stylist alleged a ‘sexualized, racially charged, and illegal work environment’ while working for Lizzo’s Big Grrrl Big Tour company. Lizzo has denied all the claims.
‘I started losing weight in the fall of 2023,’ she wrote. ‘I was severely depressed. I had been the subject of vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me. I became deeply suicidal. I cut off all my loved ones.’
‘So, in my self-loathing and self-neglect I began to rot,’ she later said. ‘As someone who has talked and sang about self-love their entire career, it was hard to watch that happen to myself. And so I decided to turn my extreme inaction to action.’
Her health kick began with Pilates, an exercise she turned to to ‘process my pain through my body.’
Lizzo’s weight loss journey began unintentionally; pictured May
The hitmaker is known for being proud of her size. (Pictured in 2020)
‘I only worked with black women instructors and learned that Pilates was actually cofounded by a black woman,’ she explained. ‘I used it as physical therapy. Sometimes I cried after sessions. I found that I had lost some weight in that process, but it wasn’t as significant as it is now. Because it wasn’t intentional. I’d decided that winter to sit and record a video saying I wanted to intentionally lose weight.’
Lizzo later realized she had been using the weight as a shield and stressed slimming down was ‘energetic… not vain.’
‘After talking to a few therapists I discovered that my weight had been a protective shield, a joyful comfort zone, and even sometimes a super hero suit to protect me through life. My weight, like my hair, represented time. It stored energy. And I wanted to release myself from it. So from that moment on any weight on my physical body that was subtracted was not a pound ‘lost’ but a pound ‘released’. It was energetic for me, not vain.’
That being said, she still wanted to ‘change’ how she felt in her body.
‘But let’s be real. I wanted to change how I felt in my body. I had been holding onto so much since my father passed away in 2009. I had been holding onto relationships that were deeply abusive and toxic since 2011. I had been carrying the weight of supporting my family since 2016. I wanted to let-it-the-f**k go.’
Lizzo has previously credited her dramatic slim down to hard work and discipline, but she has also admitted to trying Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs to help her on her journey.
Lizzo has been displaying her progress on social media
‘I’ve tried everything,’ she admitted on the Just Trish podcast in June.
‘It’s just the science, for me, calories in vs. calories out. Ozempic works because you eat less food.’
‘It makes you feel full. So, if you can just do that on your own and get mind-over-matter, it’s the same,’ she explained.
Lizzo abandoned her junk food vegan lifestyle, during which she said she was eating between 3,000 and 5,000 calories a day for a more regimented routine.
‘So for me, when I actually started eating whole foods and eating like beef and chicken and fish, I was actually full and not expanding my stomach by putting a lot of like fake things in there that wasn’t actually filling me up.’
During an appearance on The Jason Lee Show, the singer refused to reveal the exact number of pounds she lost, but did claim that she was bullied for her curves due to her confidence as a plus-sized woman.
Lizzo later realized she had been using the weight as a shield and stressed slimming down was ‘energetic… not vain’; pictured 2023
Lizzo has since refused to reveal exactly how much weight she has lost
‘I think it was crazy to people because I was fat,’ she stated.
‘The shocking factor was that people couldn’t believe that someone that looked like me was confident,’ she said.
Host Jason Lee responded, ‘you were cute when you were bigger’, before Lizzo fired back, ‘I was fine as f**k!’
When pressed to reveal exactly how much weight loss she’s lost on her journey, the singer cagily responded, ‘If I say the number, I don’t think people could do the math.’
She continued, ‘I’ve just seen a lot of TikToks where it’s like, “Lizzo talks about her 500lbs weight loss!” Why are y’all putting numbers on me? It kind of annoys me.’
In January, the singer proudly announced that she had achieved her weight loss goal.
On Instagram at the time, she shared: ‘I did it. Today when I stepped on my scale, I reached my weight release goal.
‘I haven’t seen this number since 2014! Let this be a reminder you can do anything you put your mind to. Time for new goals!’
