Celebs Who Turned To Extreme Diets After Being Fat-Shamed

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Countless celebrities have experienced the toll of fat-shaming firsthand. While some have opened up about feeling pressured to lose weight for the sake of their careers, others have endured a barrage of intrusive comments about their body from tabloids and/or people on the Internet. When people step in to defend a celebrity against fat-shamers on the Internet, the trolls commonly defend themselves by saying they commented on their weight because they were worried about the celebrity's health. 

However, in a chat with the BBC, Jane Ogden, a professor of health psychology at the University of Surrey, said fat-shaming isn't conducive to a person's well-being. "All of the evidence is that fat shaming just makes people feel worse," Ogden explained. "It lowers their self-esteem. It makes them feel depressed and anxious and as a result of that what they then do is self-destructive." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mental toll of fat-shaming prompted many A-listers to turn to extreme diets. 

Generally speaking, crash diets aren't good for health. In the process of depriving our bodies of food to lose weight, we potentially reduce our intake of vitamins and minerals that are essential to the functioning of our bodies. In some cases, extreme crash dieting can lead to malnutrition, which in turn can interfere with muscle and bone growth, cause dehydration, constipation, mental fog, and low energy levels, and also weaken the immune system. Over time, the calorie restrictions extreme dieting generally requires can also cause the body's metabolism to slow down. Ultimately, by opening up about their experiences with extreme diets and fat-shaming, the following celebrities have shone a light on just how damaging words can be.

Over the years, there have been several times when Oprah Winfrey has been shamed amid her weight loss struggles and did not deserve it. While appearing on "The Jamie Kern Lima Show" in 2024, the television icon shared that she had seen tabloids ridiculing her for her weight week after week for nearly 25 years. In those years, Winfrey also had to face body-shaming comments from comedians and talk show hosts. Eventually, she began to feel that body-shaming her had become so normalized that it was akin to a national sport.

Although the talk show host endured her fair share of shaming through the decades, one moment in particular stands out to her as the trigger for her going down several unsustainable and potentially damaging paths. In her 2017 book "Food, Health, and Happiness," Winfrey recalled that during Joan Rivers' stint as a guest host on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" in 1985, she bluntly told her she ought to be 15 pounds lighter during her next appearance on the show. Winfrey detailed how the comments affected her mindset afterward, writing, "If all I had to do to make everybody realize how much I deserved my success — and their approval — was lose 15 pounds, then let the dieting begin!" 

In the aftermath, she tried countless crash diets, everything from the Optifast liquid diet to the infamous cabbage soup diet and the grapefruit diet. Now, there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't even think about going on a crash diet. Highlighting one such reason in her book, Winfrey wrote that these diets brought unsustainable results. 

In 2023, Kristin Davis admitted to Haute Living that she felt out of place on the sets of "Melrose Place" because she was surrounded by women with smaller frames than hers. Elaborating on her struggles from the time in a 2025 People interview, Davis said that a line producer on the show explicitly told her, "Just don't gain any weight," after complimenting her appearance. 

During her run on the soap opera, the "Couples Retreat" actor picked up extreme dieting and exercising habits that triggered a fainting spell in a parking lot and even caused her to forget her name at times. In her chat with Haute Living, Davis admitted that the body-shaming only became more blatant when she joined the cast of "Sex and the City." At the time, she had to deal with tabloids shaming her with statements like, "Kristin's hips are bigger than her shoulders." Some tabloids would also deem her "pear-shaped" while praising Sarah Jessica Parker's body. 

Speaking on a 2026 episode of her "Are You a Charlotte?" podcast, Davis shared that during her time on "SATC," she went through a phase where she solely ate M&Ms because she read that ballet dancers stayed lithe through a diet of candy bars and cigarettes. The Emmy nominee told Haute Living that although she has experienced her fair share of disordered eating over the years, she has learned not to put too much stock in other people's opinions of her body as she has grown older.

In Jessica Simpson's 2020 memoir "Open Book," she recalled how she was only 17 when she performed "Amazing Grace" for Tommy Mottola to get him to sign her for Columbia Records. Although the record executive wanted to get Simpson on board, he allegedly urged her to first drop 15 pounds. She recalled Mottola saying, "That's what it will take to be Jessica Simpson" (via People).  

Although "The Dukes of Hazzard" star hadn't even finished high school back then, she was still compelled to adopt an extreme diet to bag the record deal. "I immediately went on an extremely strict diet, and started taking diet pills," Simpson wrote, before adding that the diet pills remained a fixture in her life for the next two decades. In "Open Book," she wrote that the ill effects of extreme dieting became more apparent over the next few years. While she followed the Atkins diet, a low-carb eating plan, she found herself obsessing and getting anxious over food. "Everyone went on about how great I looked, but I couldn't enjoy it because I was so freaking hungry," Simpson recalled of her feelings from those years (via Entertainment Tonight).

In a 2020 People interview, the "With You" singer said that in the early years of her career, she watched people criticize her for aspects of her body that she had never paid much attention to. While reflecting on how those criticisms impacted her, she wrote, "It's heartbreaking and I mean, I punished myself for it." Despite her best attempts to push those body-shaming comments to the back of her mind, they kept popping back up.

Speaking to People in 2025, Ariel Winter shared that body-shaming comments became a fixture of her life in her teens. At the age of 14, the "Modern Family" alum endured adults calling her a "fat s***" or speculating that she was pregnant because of how they perceived her body. While appearing on "Red Table Talk" in 2021, the former child actor said that the negativity didn't just stem from news outlets, but also from some fans of the popular show who made comments like "You got so fat on TV, now you look so fat." 

Winter shared that the constant body-shaming eventually gave rise to an unhealthy mindset: "If I change these things about me, the things they hate about me, I'm not going to get that anymore. I'm going to get praised." While discussing the constant body-shaming in a 2016 Teen Vogue interview, Winter confessed that she had even tried crash diets to lose weight. In a 2020 chat with Teen Vogue, Winter said that although the body-shaming comments continued to sting as she had grown older, she had learned to cope with them in a more healthy way. 

Instead of letting these criticisms dictate her life, she contrasted them against her more confident self-image and tried her best to move past them. Over time, she also learned that extreme restrictions don't do her much good. In 2019, the voice actor told E! News that strict diets had never been sustainable for her. So, instead of making her favorite foods off-limits and making them more tempting, she began enjoying them in moderation.

Speaking to Women's Health in 2020, Carrie Underwood recalled seeing comments like "Carrie's getting fat" online shortly after she won "American Idol" in 2005. At the time, the country singer knew that paying attention to other people's opinions of herself was no good. However, the comments prompted her to realize that her diet wasn't helping her energy levels. So, when she was on tour with the other contestants from the talent show, she became mindful of calories and exercising on an elliptical. 

While those changes helped the "Before He Cheats" hitmaker's energy levels and sleep quality, she eventually started pushing things too far, amping up her exercise time and reducing her daily caloric intake even further. Sometimes, she would power through days on only 800 calories. Elaborating on her struggles with diet in an interview with People, Underwood said that part of the reason she began eating less was that she started receiving compliments about how good she looked after implementing smaller lifestyle changes. After hearing those compliments, Underwood began to question how she looked before losing weight and felt compelled to go to more drastic lengths with calorie restriction. 

When asked if she had disordered eating, the Grammy winner replied, "No, because none of it was intentional, you know? I wasn't eating enough calories, but it wasn't because I was trying to starve myself. I just didn't know how many calories I should be eating." Underwood also admitted to taking weight-loss supplements at one point. Over time, her diet changed. These days, the vegetarian celeb who swears by a plant-based diet focuses on eating balanced, protein-packed meals.