Alana ‘Honey Boo Boo’ Thompson revealed how her mother Mama June’s dramatic weight loss impacted her self-esteem as an impressionable young girl.
While reflecting on watching her mom, 45, shed 300 pounds very quickly, the reality star, 19, admitted to fearing she would need to undergo the same procedures to look ‘perfect picture’ and like a ‘skinny little model.’
‘My mama was a bigger girl, and her having to get surgery and shrink down to this one size, I thought in my head like, “Oh, am I going to have to do that one day because I’m a bigger girl?”‘ she told People.
The teenager, who rose to fame on TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras, detailed how the drastic change in her mom’s physical appearance ‘definitely did take a toll’ on her own confidence.
‘It didn’t take as much of a toll on my life [at the time],’ Thompson explained. ‘But now I’m looking back and I’m like, “That was crazy.” That was a dramatic change, and I didn’t know how to even think of my mom. My mom went from being 300 lbs. to 100 lbs.’
Alana ‘Honey Boo Boo’ Thompson revealed how her mother Mama June’s dramatic weight loss negatively affected her self-esteem as an impressionable young girl
Thompson went on to confess that ‘it was kind of scary’ seeing her mom ‘lose all of that weight so fast.’
As documented on her family’s reality show, Mama June: From Not to Hot, Thompson’s mom underwent $75,000 worth of treatments, including the insertion of a gastric sleeve, a breast augmentation, liposuction and skin removal of her ‘turkey neck’ and ‘bat wings.’
‘She was so tiny, she almost looked sick,’ Thompson continued, noting that the transformation ‘took a big toll’ on her body image, particularly, as a ‘bigger girl.’
June successfully lost around 355 pounds after undergoing gastric sleeve surgery 10 years ago.
Last year, the mother-of-four revealed to her Instagram followers that she ‘went from 550 pounds to 311’ the day she had her surgery, and, six weeks later, she was down to 195 pounds.
In 2022, Thompson, who was just 16 at the time, revealed to ET she was contemplating weight-loss surgery.
‘I just wanna make sure that this is actually something I wanna do before I just go and do it,’ she said, at the time, about a $13,000 procedure called suture sculpt endoscopic sleeve. ‘I wanna make sure that it’s, like, not something that’s, like, gonna kill me.’
Thompson also explained that she knows she ‘could get in the gym’ and ‘diet’ to get similar results.
While reflecting on watching her mom, 45, shed 300 pounds very quickly, the reality star, 19, admitted to fearing she would need to undergo the same procedures to look ‘perfect picture’ and like a ‘skinny little model’ (seen in 2017)
In 2022, Thompson, who was just 16 at the time, revealed to ET she was contemplating weight-loss surgery
The teenager rose to fame at the age of 5 on TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras; seen in 2012
‘I’ve tried. I will say I’ve tried, but the one thing with me is I have no motivation. I have no motivation to just keep going to the gym every day. I have no motivation to keep eating healthy because, like, I’m gonna eat what I think is good,’ she said.
Thompson continued: ‘I’m not [gonna] sit there and force myself to eat no Caesar salad because I think it’s healthy. No. I’m gonna eat what I think’s good. So, I just think I don’t have motivation, and I feel like the surgery would be, like, probably the easiest way to just, like, lose it fast.’
Thompson, who plans on becoming a nurse, is currently a rising junior at Regis University in Colorado.
‘I just always told myself you know that you want to do something better with your life and bigger with your life than just being on TV, so you’ve got to get up and go, you’ve got to graduate so you can make it to college and be the nurse that you want to be,’ she told People earlier this week.
