Source: Rich Fury / Getty
To look at artist Lizzo today, it would be hard to imagine her not entirely comfortable in her skin. But self-love and self-acceptance is a continual process. So the Lizzo we see on stage and on magazine covers rocking lingerie and leotards is not the woman she always was.
Like so many women she struggled with her weight from her own mind and from the comments of others. She recently spoke to Jameela Jamil for a new series called “I Weigh Conversations.”
During the sit-down Lizzo shared how she once had unrealistic and unhealthy expectations for her body.
“Every Black woman I saw was really light-skinned, or had straight, blond hair,” Lizzo, 30, said. “So I was like, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful, I want to look like that!’ but I would look in the mirror and I looked so far from that, that I was almost like, ‘I want to be somebody else.’ I didn’t have little things I wanted to change about myself. I had this entire fantasy about waking up and being like, Sailor Moon. Completely unrealistic goals.”
She also shared a particularly stinging incident from a man she was dating when she was younger.
“I’ve ballooned in weight and all of that, up and down, and I remember when I was like, 20 or something, it was the hardest year of my life, it was awful, for a lot of reasons,” she said. “I didn’t have any money and I wasn’t eating, and I was also trying to be thin. I was working out a lot. And I remember I was with this guy, and we were laying down, and he was like, ‘I’m just so relaxed when I’m with you.’ And then he’s like, ‘So I showed your picture to my friends, and they said that your face is great but your body needs work.’ I was like, ‘WHAT!’ Who says that to somebody? And I was the smallest I had ever been in my entire life.”
Liz said that at that point, she was so focused on altering her body, that she didn’t interpret the man’s comments as insulting.
“You know what, it didn’t hurt my feelings at first because I believed him,” she admitted. “When he said it to me I was like, yeah he’s right, because I had been working on that for so long and so hard and wanting my body to match my face and be this certain body type, and that’s the craziest part for me, that I actually believed his s—.”
Lizzo said there were times where she wanted to cut her stomach off because she was so ashamed of the way she looked.
Eventually, she realized that no matter how big or how small she was, she would never be able to please everyone.
“I’m not going to be able to please everyone with my outward appearance,” she said. “Someone’s always going to have a critique, someone’s always going to have some negativity to say about me. So all that matters is what I think of it. And I had to go so deep inside myself and look in the mirror. Looking in the mirror and accepting what’s in the mirror is very, very difficult. And right now, I love it every time I look in the mirror.”
She said that accepting herself in this way and not losing weight, is what made her more beautiful.
“I think because I believe that I’m beautiful and I found that beauty within myself, it starts to come out,” she said. “Maybe I was always beautiful to people, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I’m glowing because I had to find that.”
You can watch Lizzo’s full interview, by clicking the link in her Instagram post below.
