American singer Lizzo has revealed she felt 'ashamed' about her body and thought she wasn't 'desirable'.
The 34-year-old singer has opened up about her past insecurities and fears over the way she looked early on in her music career.
Lizzo, real name Melissa Viviane Jefferson, said that the lack of women who looked like her performing on stage made her think audiences would prefer to watch someone else on stage.
She said her fears got so bad that she didn't want to perform solo on stage so that she'd have someone else up there to take the focus off her.
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While she used to think she didn't have the right image for a famous pop singer, she's since worked through her fears and is now in a place where she's happy with the way she looks.
Now the singer is championing chic clothing for larger women after her own experiences in the fashion industry.
The singer told Elle UK that she felt so insecure during her formative years as 'nearly every star I saw on stage was thinner and lighter skinned'.
She said: "And so I always felt like, even if the song is great, people wouldn’t want to hear it coming from me. So I thought, if I have other people on stage, too, that will take the focus off me a little bit.
"I know people want to look like me now. But I’m talking about what it was like in my formative years. I wasn’t really set up to believe that I was desirable.
"For me, being a pop star - part of it is people either want to be you or be with you. And I didn’t feel like I had any of those qualities."
Lizzo confessed that she 'spent years being ashamed' before getting to a point now where 'people want to look like me'.
In that vein of helping people look like her, the singer is now focusing on fashion for larger women.
While she's honoured that she's been able to enjoy custom-made outfits from plenty of brands, 'millions of people who are my size or bigger' who also want to wear something glamorous have no such luck when it comes to finding stylish outfits.
She said: "I don’t want to be the token big girl for the fashion world. I want to open the door. I want this for everybody."
Lizzo also wants to help people with her music, calling her new album Special something that people could use as a 'soundtrack to survive' as it was written during the coronavirus pandemic.
The singer said people coming out of lockdown would be 'coming out of a depression' and that the end of pandemic restrictions wouldn't mean the end of their mental health woes.
Special, the new album from Lizzo, is available now.
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Joe Harker