Tired of being called the dancing fat girl, Whitney Thore from the show My Big Fat Fabulous Life took matters into her own hands, promising not just to lose weight but also to show the world her hard journey.
Whitney has been a fighter through it all: the hate, the trolling online, people’s judgment, and the constant questions about her methods of weight loss that have many wondering if she’s healthy or not.
Being on camera since 2015, which is also when the show My Big Fat Fabulous Life first aired its pilot episode, and having people constantly judge you and your life must not have been easy for Whitney, but she has been brave about it.
The show gave people insight into her health conditions and medical concerns related to her weight and why it had increased so much. For her, it was an important step, revealing all about herself to the public, because not only was it important to educate people about different conditions one might be dealing with but also to get people to stop body shaming others mindlessly.
Forced to give up the one thing she absolutely loved, that being dancing, because of her increasing weight, this TLC show has, over its eleven seasons, covered Whitney’s journey of reclaiming her love for dancing and for herself.
She has become a big advocate for stopping body shaming people, knowing that it could lead to mental troubles. Instead, she has taken to promoting body positivity and losing weight without hating yourself.
Over the seasons, she has been asked personal questions about her weight loss journey and whether she ever turned to taking drugs or looked at surgery as an option. But Whitney Thore has always denied indulging in any of those methods of weight loss, though she never fails to mention that she does not judge those who do because she very well understands how being heavy can make her so desperate.
Thore’s Dramatic Weightloss in 2023
Thirty-nine-year-old Whitney weighed somewhere around three hundred and ninety pounds when she started the show, and over the years as an audience, we saw those numbers fluctuate a lot. But with the start of the eleventh season of the show, speculations rose regarding her method of weight loss, as Whitney seemed to have lost quite a lot in a short time.
Previously, on one of her social media posts, Whitney wrote that she had spent most part of her life struggling with PCOS, which led to a major weight gain right as she entered college, and this eventually threw her into a spiral of self-hatred and slump.
Around mid-2023, leading up to the start of the new season of the show, fans noticed and called out Whitney for a drastic change in her body, suspecting the use of foul measures like the use of drugs or surgery, both of which Whitney has been against.
Her social media post in June of this year had fans asking her if she had given in to weight loss surgery or if she had finally used Ozempic. These suspicions continued to rise, getting to a point that forced Whitney to sit down and address all of the floating rumors.
She stated that she knows that her body has changed drastically, and it’s very obvious that she has lost quite a lot of weight. She also revealed that the reason behind her weight loss is not because of some magic drug but because of her dead mother.
Fans who have been following the show would know already that Barbara Thore or Babs, Whitney’s mother, who had probably the best one-liners on the show, passed away last year on December 7th, 2022, at the age of seventy-six years.
We saw her memorial at the start of this season, and clearly, it seems to have taken quite a toll on Whitney’s mental health. Her mother’s passing and the grief that continues to follow her even now is a big reason why she has lost so much weight so quickly.
As we mentioned before, Whitney has said that she does not judge those who use drugs like Ozempic or even surgery as a weight loss option because twenty years of being fat has given her enough experience to know how it is being a fat person in a fatphobic society.
Having said this, she has emphasized that she is not one of those people and that her journey has been what people have seen through the show. It was only because of the grief that came with the loss of her mother that she lost so much weight in less than a year.
