Singer Lizzo reveals she was frustrated being ‘overshadowed’ by her ‘fatness’

Keep up with the latest news and be part of our weekly giveaways and airtime sharing; follow our WhatsApp channel for more updates. Click to Follow

In a candid blog post about her weight reduction journey, American singer Lizzo expressed her frustration at being “overshadowed” by her “fatness.”

After years of accepting her role as the face of the body positivity movement, the 37-year-old singer has drastically reduced her weight in recent years.

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.

‘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.’

Lizzo had no intention of losing weight at first, but she made the decision to do so once her mental state worsened due to lawsuits from former teammates.

At the time, three back-up dancers accused her of sexual harassment, fat shaming, and a hostile work environment, while a former stylist reported a ‘sexualized, racially charged, and illegal work environment’ while working for Lizzo’s Big Grrrl Big Tour company. Lizzo has refuted every allegation.

‘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.’

‘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 then recognized she had been using the weight as a shield and underlined 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.’

Despite this, she still desired to “change” her body’s sensations.

‘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 drastic slim down to hard work and discipline, but she has also admitted to trying Ozempic and other GLP-1 medicines to help her on her journey.

Please don’t forget to “Allow the notification” so you will be the first to get our gist when we publish it. 
Drop your comment in the section below, and don’t forget to share the post.