Gabourey Sidibe recently underwent surgery to lose weight and she’s finally opening up about it in her new memoir, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare.
The 33-year old Precious and Empire star told People magazine that after trying to lose weight naturally for more than a decade; she then decided on surgery after she and her brother were diagnosed with diabetes.
“I just didn’t want to worry,” Sidibe, 33, tells PEOPLE of her decision to get laproscopic bariatric surgery after she and her older brother Ahmed, 34, were diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. “I truly didn’t want to worry about all the effects that go along with diabetes. I genuinely [would] worry all the time about losing my toes.”
“My surgeon said they’d cut my stomach in half. This would limit my hunger and capacity to eat. My brain chemistry would change and I’d want to eat healthier. I’ll take it! My lifelong relationship with food had to change,” she writes in her wise, witty and unapologetic memoir, out in May.
“The surgery wasn’t the easy way out,” she says. “I wasn’t cheating by getting it done. I wouldn’t have been able to lose as much as I’ve lost without it.”
Since the procedure, Sidibe has changed her eating habits — working with a nutritionist — and upped her fitness regimen, working out with a trainer, swimming and riding a tricycle around the Empire set.
“It has taken me years to realize that what I was born with is all beautiful,” she writes in her book. “I did not get this surgery to be beautiful. I did it so I can walk around comfortably in heels. I want to do a cartwheel. I want not to be in pain every time I walk up a flight of stairs.”
“I have a goal right now, and I’m almost there,” she says. “And then once I’ve got it, I’ll set another. But my starting weight and my goal weight, they’re personal. If too many people are involved, I’ll shut down.”
“There’s nothing ugly about me. Anyone trying to convince me that I am — and it’s usually me — is wasting her time,” she says. “I was in a war with my body for a long time. If I’d started treating it better sooner, I wouldn’t have spent so many years hating myself. But I love my body now.
WATCH: Gabourey Sidibe gets real about her body and life choices.
