Rebel Wilson Reflects On 40-Pound Weight Loss & Freezing Her Eggs

Rebel Wilson took to Instagram Live Wednesday to talk about her weight loss, fertility, and love life. The star embarked on a “Year of Health” for 2020, aiming to lose 40 pounds, and proudly reached her goal weight with a month to spare.

“I always wanted to be healthier,” Wilson said on the live. “But I either just felt like I didn’t have the time or felt like, oh, well, making a lot of money being bigger, you know it’s part of my comedic persona in a lot of ways. So I would question, sometimes I would lose a few kilos but then I’d gain it back.”

She continued that, when she’d been thin before, it was actually one of the most unhealthiest times of her life.

“I’ve probably been overweight probably since I was about 20 and then this year I turned 40,” she said. “So, it’s probably 20 years. I was at my skinniest when I had malaria and I almost died. And then when I came out of hospital everyone’s like, ‘Wow! What did you do?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, almost died.'”

Now that she’s safely reached 165 pounds, though, she hopes to keep the weight off – and for good reason. Before endeavoring on her year of health, she decided to freeze her eggs, hoping to “have quality eggs in the bank.”

“Apart from turning 40 and thinking I wasn’t maybe going to work much this year, psychic-ly, I knew I’d have a bit more time and I was also freezing my eggs,” Wilson revealed. “As all good career women out there should know, if that’s something that interests you, it’s a pretty good time to do it. Getting to 40s is kind of even leaving it a little too late. It’s better to do it a bit earlier if you can.”

Wilson also described how she had struggled with her relationship with eating for a very long time before she decided to take the year off. A lot of her eating habits stemmed from not only misinformation (she thought for some time that being skinny made you dumber), but also her need for a vice.

“What I do have is a real sweet tooth, and suffer from emotional eating – whether that be happiness, sadness, celebrating, depressed, emotional eating is kind of the thing I did,” Wilson described. “How I was dealing with fame and the pressures of work was emotional eating.”

In that vein, she also described that a lot of her emotional eating stemmed from a low self-worth.

“I wasn’t treating myself with love and respect,” she said. “I just wasn’t valuing myself, and was telling myself negative things like ‘yeah, we’ll stuff it. Yeah, just eat that whole thing of ice cream or packet of brownies, because, yeah, who cares? Whatever, you deserve that.’ And that was hard, so what I’m trying to do is change those patterns.”

As for her weightloss and recovery process, Wilson explained that she worked out and dieted pretty strenuously, keeping her food intake under 1500 calories a day, but that her favorite weight-loss activity was walking, even recommending her favorite things to listen to along the way – apparently, she has a long playlist of show tunes, and an intense playlist specifically for pushing herself to go uphill. On the emotional side of things, she learned to give herself positive affirmations and journal her feelings instead of eating them.

However, Wilson clarified that her advice was not that of a doctor’s, and that, to some degree, her advice should be taken with a grain of salt – she was just hoping to provide some extra guidance and encouragement to those who were endeavoring on a similar struggle as she was.

“God only knows that I struggled with being healthy. I liked being curvy, and whatever weight I end up being I still want to be curvy,” Wilson said. “I feel like I’m confident at any size, because your size isn’t the one thing that defines you. It’s your whole personality, its all your skills and abilities, so I’m a very confident person in that respect.”

In fact, Wilson also revealed that she’d been with her boyfriend before she even started to lose weight, proving that she could find love regardless of her size.

“Someone is asking me, ‘Is the hot guy on your Instagram your boyfriend?’ Yes, yes, that is correct,” Wilson said with a smile. “But he’s a very private person, so I don’t like to give away too much in that department. But I will say we dated before I started any of this health journey as well as now. Goes to show you, ladies, you don’t have to be a certain size to get a boyfriend.”