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During filming of the first season of HBO’s Insecure, Issa Rae slimmed down considerably. And while she never was very heavy as her star rose in the public eye, she lost enough weight for it to be noticeable. Everyone was talking about it but the 33-year-old.

But as we prepare for the arrival of Season 3 on August 12, the creative and recent CFDA Awards host opened up to Cosmopolitan, albeit briefly, about how she managed to drop the pounds in a healthy way, right in front of our eyes.

“I thrive off fresh starts,” she said. “I will do a cleanse or diet—I need a reset button. So seeing myself on TV for a season was an excuse to be like ‘I want to lose a couple of pounds.’ I want to look my best, be my best, and feel my best.”

In a previous conversation with The Breakfast Club about her weight loss in 2017, as the second season of the hit comedy was preparing to begin, Rae reiterated that seeing herself on the small screen was the motivation she needed to lose the weight she had been wanting to shed since her adolescent years.

“I started just eating right. I stopped eating all of the things and started eating less of the things,” she said. “And once you’re on TV — I’ve been seeing people say, ‘HBO made her do it,’ or ‘She felt that Hollywood pressure.’ I’ve been trying to lose weight since I was 12. That’s just it. For me, this actually gave me a reason to do it and it really just is about how I feel I want to look. And it’s all vanity. I want to look good in a bathing suit in the summertime. I want to look good to me naked. That’s it. And when December rolls around, I’m gonna be eating again and going to town.”

Rae wrote in her book, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, that she she lost a lot of weight years ago when traveling to her former home, Senegal, and also shed some pounds in college at Stanford. This time around though, by taking control of her diet first, Rae has been able to lose the weight and keep it off.

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