Lizzo believes we, as a society, must “undo the effects of the Ozempic boom” because plus-sized women are being “erased.”
The musician, 37, took to Substack on Sunday to share an essay titled, “Why is everybody losing weight and what do we do? Sincerely, a person who’s lost weight.”
Lizzo, who began shedding pounds in the fall of 2023 following a very public harassment and hostile work environment scandal, confessed that the ordeal made her “deeply suicidal.”
She “would tend to binge when sad and depressed,” but she “didn’t feel like doing that” after her reputational fall from grace.
In search of “a way to process [her] pain through [her] body,” Lizzo took up Pilates. (Over the summer, she finally copped to trying Ozempic — a weight-loss medication initially intended to treat type II diabetes — early on in her transformation journey.)
“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,” she wrote.
“I’d decided that winter to sit and record a video saying I wanted to intentionally lose weight. Why? I guess I felt like I had lost everything, and I wanted to change.”
Lizzo decided to “release” herself from the weight — and the energy — she was carrying.
“It was energetic for me, not vain,” she penned, noting that she didn’t want to be one of those “big girl celebrities” who tell their fans they lost weight “for medical reasons.”
While she acknowledged that her health has improved, she insisted she “wanted to change how [she] felt in her body.”
“It was never about being ‘thin’ for me. I don’t even think it’s possible for me to be considered actually ‘thin.’ I will always have the stretch, and the skin of a woman who carries great weight. And I’m proud of that. Even when the world doesn’t want me to be,” she explained.
The singer-songwriter was admittedly “sick and tired of [her] identity being overshadowed by [her] fatness,” and she knows that experience is not specific to her.
“We’re in an era where the bigger girls are getting smaller because they’re tired of being judged. And now those bigger girls are being judged for getting smaller by the very community they used to empower,” she argued.
“There’s nothing wrong with living in a bigger body. There’s nothing wrong with being fat. But if a woman wants to change, she should be allowed to change.”
According to Lizzo, “extended sizes are being magically erased from websites,” “plus sized models are no longer getting booked for modeling gigs” and “all of our big girls are not-so big anymore.”
She described herself as still “objectively big,” weighing “over 200 pounds,” but she feels “some people may have used the [body positivity] movement for financial gain or fame, and once it no longer served them they abandoned it.”
She concluded, “We have a lot of work to do, to undo the effects of the ozempic boom. I have a lot of work to do to regain the trust of the movement that gave me wings.”
Lizzo is “willing and ready” to put in that work by continuing to “have conversations,” holding herself and her peers “accountable” and reintroducing “nuance into our discussions.”
The rapper has previously revealed that she saw the best results in her physical transformation when she ditched her vegan diet and began eating meat.