The world has sounded off on Lizzo's weight, but now she's taking back the mic.

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, whose appearance has been the subject of public scrutiny, opened up about her weight-loss journey in an emotional essay published on Substack Sunday, Nov. 23.

"I started losing weight in the fall of 2023," Lizzo, 37, wrote. "I was severely depressed. I had been the subject of a vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me."

In August 2023, Lizzo was sued by a group of former dancers on allegations of sexual harassment and weight-shaming. The "Truth Hurts" songstress, who's denied the claims, said the "extreme isolation" and emotional distress she experienced during that period inspired her to focus on her fitness.

"The old me would tend to binge when sad and depressed," Lizzo continued. "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. Not because I thought it would result in my weight loss, but honestly, I didn't care about my body."

She added: "I didn't want to feel safe. A huge part of me blamed myself for what had happened to me. … So, in my self-loathing and self-neglect, I began to rot. 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."

Lizzo, who gained fame with her feel-good pop anthems and body-positive advocacy, has previously been outspoken about her weight. In 2024, after the animated comedy series "South Park" featured the singer in a spoof on the medication Ozempic, Lizzo declared in a TikTok post that she "really showed the world how to love yourself."

In January, the singer gave an update on her weight-loss journey, revealing she met her goal of lowering her body mass index by 10.5 and losing 16% body fat.

Lizzo says weight was a 'protective shield'

In her Substack post, Lizzo revealed her weight-loss journey inadvertently began when she started taking Pilates classes, which she said gave her a "way to process my pain through my body."

"I used it as physical therapy. Sometimes I cried after sessions," Lizzo wrote. "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."

The "About Damn Time" singer said she later recorded a video diary, in which she expressed the desire to "intentionally lose weight," explaining that she wanted to "change how I felt in my body" and shed past emotional issues such as the grief of her father's 2009 death and "deeply abusive and toxic" relationships.

"After talking to a few therapists, I discovered that my weight had been a protective shield, a joyful comfort zone, and even sometimes a superhero suit to protect me through life," Lizzo wrote. "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.'"

Lizzo on being 'overshadowed by my fatness'

For Lizzo, weight loss in the public eye is a hopeless catch-22.

"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," Lizzo wrote on Substack. "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."

Despite putting on a brave face in the spotlight, the pop star shared that she was "sick and tired of my identity being overshadowed by my fatness," adding that "people could not see my talent as a musician because they were too busy accusing me of making 'being fat' my whole personality."

In terms of her stage persona, Lizzo said she made it a point to be "hypersexual and vulgar" as a way to counter "'mammy' tropes," a historical stereotype of Black women as maternal, domestic figures that has ties to the U.S. slavery system.

"We're in an era where the bigger girls are getting smaller because they're tired of being judged," Lizzo wrote. "And now those bigger girls are being judged for getting smaller by the very community they used to empower."

She added: "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."

The singer, who has continued to document her weight-loss journey on social media, said in her Substack essay that she strives to be "very conscious of how I present my 'weight release' to the world."

"I made sure not to say how much weight I actually released because I didn't want anyone holding themselves to a certain standard," Lizzo wrote. "I am fully aware my actions as a public figure can have real and possibly harmful effects on other people."

The "Good as Hell" singer also lamented the "commercialization" of the body positivity movement, which she said now suffers from a lack of diverse representation.

"So, here we are halfway through the decade, where extended sizes are being magically erased from websites," Lizzo wrote. "Plus-sized models are no longer getting booked for modeling gigs. And all of our big girls are not-so big anymore."

Although times have changed, Lizzo maintained that she's "still a proud big girl" at "over 200 pounds." She added, "I have a lot of work to do to regain the trust of the movement that gave me wings."

"We release ourselves from the illusion that there is only good and bad," Lizzo concluded. "We reintroduce nuance into our discussions. 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."

Contributing: Brendan Morrow and Jay Stahl, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lizzo gets candid on weight-loss journey in emotional essay

Reporting by Edward Segarra, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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