Serena Williams has changed her mind about taking shots to lose weight.
Speaking with Oprah Winfrey, Williams explained that she was “absolutely” skeptical of taking GLP-1 medication.
“Yes, because it’s like ‘the skinny shot’ and ‘it’s a shortcut,’” Serena on The Oprah Podcast. “So, for a long time, I didn’t do it, and I didn’t want to do it, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to take the shortcut. I’m going to work harder.’”
After giving birth to her daughters, Olympia, 8, and Adira, 2, Williams said she “tried everything” without success.
“I tried every diet, I’ve tried every workout,” she continued. “I’ve tried walking for hours. I was going to Europe and Paris, and I would just walk for hours, the 20,000 steps a day. Every single thing and nothing was working.”
Williams said that even when she lost weight, she craved calories because her “ body liked to be at a certain weight.”
“It’s so weird, because whenever I lose weight, all of a sudden I’ll get even hungrier,” she shared. “And when I reach a certain weight, it wants to go back the other way.”
“That’s your biology,” Oprah responded.
Williams recently showed her support for the GLP-1 medication and announced her partnership with telehealth company Ro. She noted that her body has been the subject of scrutiny since she was a teenager.
“It does affect you mentally,” she told PORTER in a Dec. 1 interview. “Absolutely. You think you’re large for your whole life and you look [back] and you’re like, ‘I was fit.’ Yeah, I had big muscles. I didn’t look like these other girls, but not everyone looks the same.”
“It was hard because when I was playing in the beginning—the first 15 years,” she added. “My body was different. I had big boobs; I had a big butt. Every athlete was like super-flat, super-thin and beautiful, but in a different way.”