Lizzo reflects on dramatic weight loss

Lizzo has described the frustration 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. 

Lizzo reflects on dramatic weight loss

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 became irritated 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.

Lizzo reflects on dramatic weight loss

Yet it was a role Lizzo had long embraced, as she earlier described in her essay defiantly hitting back at ‘obnoxious memes’.

‘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 reflects on dramatic weight loss

‘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.