Serena Williams has revealed that she’s been taking medication to manage her weight for nearly a year after struggling to maintain her body following the birth of her daughters.
“I am on GLP-1s and I am not ashamed to say it, and say it loud,” she said.
The tennis champion also announced a partnership with Ro, a digital health company that, among other things, prescribes GLP-1s through telehealth. Williams’s husband Alexis Ohanian is an investor in Ro and a board member. The campaign focuses on reducing the stigma that taking GLP-1s is a “shortcut.”
“As an athlete and as someone that has done everything, I just couldn’t get my weight to where I needed to be at a healthy place — and believe me, I don’t take shortcuts,” Williams said in a press release.
“After my first kid Olympia, the weight literally would just not come off,” she says in a video for Ro. “I was back on the courts, I was in the gym, I was eating clean every single day without any changes to my body. And it was so frustrating to see the scale stay the same — or not. If anything, it was more.”
Williams revealed in an interview with TODAY that after her daughter Olympia was born in 2017, she walked and ran for hours to try to lose weight.
“I literally was playing a professional sport, and I could never go back to where I needed to be for my health, for my healthy weight, no matter what I did,” she told TODAY. After having her second daughter, Adira, “it just got even harder.” The 23-time Grand Slam champion even tried going vegan and vegetarian, eating a high-protein vegetarian diet, and would hit 20,000 steps per day.
But it wasn’t all about her weight: There were health concerns, too. She said that diabetes runs in her family, and Black Americans have a higher risk of developing the condition. She was also dealing with knee pain that she hoped could be alleviated by losing weight.
“I had a lot of issues with my knees, especially after I had my kid,” she said. “That, quite frankly, definitely had an effect on maybe some wins that I could have had in my career.”
Since she began taking the medication, Williams told TODAY that her joints feel “lighter, like they’re not taking as much of a load.”
“I knew my body was missing something it needed,” Williams says in the campaign. “For me, the answer was GLP-1s.”
Ro reports that Williams lost 31 pounds in eight months with Ro, after previously losing some weight with another GLP-1 provider (they didn’t say which).
“It was the best decision and the best thing I did for my body in a very long time,” Williams said.
