My Big Fat Fabulous Life star Whitney Way Thore got candid about her recent weight loss.
“I hate addressing this, but no, I have not had medical intervention to lose weight,” Thore, 39, explained in a Sunday, February 11, Instagram video while showing off her outfit ahead of her dad’s birthday celebration. “In 2015 (season 1), I weighed 385 pounds. In 2018, I lost 50 pounds. When my mom got sick and eventually died, I lost 50 more.”
Thore noted that she now weighs “285 pounds” and has stayed at the same weight for nearly one year.
“This is the second time in my life I’ve lost 100 pounds,” she shared with her followers. “I’m still very fat. Thank you for the compliments, but I really don’t like obsessing over my body and I don’t like it when others do it either. 💜.”
Thore began starring on her own reality show, My Big Fat Fabulous, in 2015 and it has continued for 11 seasons. The TLC series follows Thore, a former dancer, as she copes with gaining 200 pounds due to polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).
Since gaining a large following on social media, Thore has continued to be vocal about body image.
In August 2020, Thore took to Instagram to reveal that she isn’t “uncomfortable” with calling herself “fat,” despite fans telling her to not use “such a mean word” to describe herself.
“Here’s just a little reminder that … it’s actually insulting to insist that a fat person who has identified as fat actually isn’t fat,” she wrote at the time. “If you try to convince me otherwise, you’re simply reinforcing the notion that being fat is bad and not making any damn sense because I am obviously fat. 😂.”
While Thore has received many comments reminding her she’s “beautiful! /funny! /smart! successful,” she noted that those remarks aren’t as empowering as someone may think.
“Telling a fat person some variation of [that] means that you have not reconciled that a person can simultaneously be fat and possess good qualities and be likable … and that’s a problem for you to work out, not fat people,” she explained. “It’s disrespectful to tell someone that the way they identify is wrong.”
Thore added that people avoiding using the word “fat” makes her “cringe.”
“I don’t need to distance myself from the word fat. I don’t need a euphemism. If it makes you uncomfortable, again, that’s on you, not me 😇,” she continued. “For many fat people, myself included, there has been a long journey of acceptance in using the word ‘fat’ as a descriptor like any other – short, brunette, and white are also adjectives I use to describe me and none are good or bad, they just are. Let fat people call themselves fat and recognize it isn’t a put-down.”
