Lizzo Questions The Rise of Today’s Weight Loss Culture

Lizzo has never been shy about speaking her mind, but her newest personal essay feels like she pulled up a chair, looked everyone in the eye, and said, "Okay, we need to talk for real." In a Substack piece published Sunday, Nov 23, titled “Why is everybody losing weight and what do we do? Sincerely, a person who’s lost weight,” the star gets honest about her own weight loss and her worries about where our culture is heading.

She explains right away that even though she now weighs over 200 pounds and is “still a proud big girl,” she feels like something strange is happening. In her words, plus-size women are being “erased” in the wave of weight loss drugs like Ozempic.

“So here we are halfway through the decade, where 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 wrote. Lizzo added that “We have a lot of work to do, to undo the effects of the Ozempic boom.”

Her worry is not just about clothing sizes disappearing, but about who gets seen and valued. She says the conversation around weight loss is complicated. She gets why people want to lose weight, because she has felt that pressure too.

Lizzo shared that part of her own motivation to drop weight was frustration that her size overshadowed everything she did.

“People could not see my talent as a musician because they were too busy accusing me of making ‘being fat’ my whole personality,” she wrote. She added that she felt forced to fight against “mammy” stereotypes by acting “hypersexual and vulgar because being a mammy by definition is being desexualized.”

For her, this is the uncomfortable truth: “We’re in an era where the bigger girls are getting smaller because they’re tired of being judged.”

The singer also revealed that she began losing weight in fall 2023 during a period of severe depression. She shared that she was "deeply suicidal" at the time and made a choice to “turn my extreme inaction into action.”

She wrote about her old habits and how they used to control her: “The old me would tend to binge when sad and depressed. I would order hundreds of dollars of food delivery and eat everything until my stomach felt like it would explode. But this time I just didn’t feel like doing that.”

Instead, she turned to Pilates to “process my pain through my body.” She also started therapy, where she realized she had been using her weight as a “protective shield” and she “wanted to let it the f— go.”

By the end of the essay, Lizzo is not telling anyone what to do with their body. She is asking for deeper, more honest conversations. She wants people to drop the idea that there are only two choices,“good and bad.”

“I want us to allow the body positive movement to expand and grow far away from the commercial slop it's become. Because movements move,” she wrote.

Her message is thoughtful, emotional, and challenging, but also hopeful. She wants a world where people are not disappearing just because society is shifting again.