JoJo: ‘I Will Never Have a Thigh Gap…And You Know What? It’s All Good’
“I will never have a thigh gap,” she writes. “Nobody has ever worried the wind might ‘wooooosh’ a little bit too hard and knock me down. At 25, I’m a brick house adorned with battle scars and cellulite, curves and confidence. Some days I have abs, sometimes mehhh…I don’t know where they go. And you know what? It’s all good.”
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JoJo admits that the road to body acceptance isn’t easy, calling it “a roller coaster ride processing and compartmentalizing all the images and opinions we are confronted with every day.”
And being in the entertainment industry doesn’t help. “People in the public eye are judged constantly—by media, by fans, even by the companies that they work for and with,” she says. “Because of this scrutiny over every detail of my appearance, I’ve spent an indecent amount of time pinching parts of my body in shame, imagining how much better it’d look if certain areas would just shrink, dissolve or stop making me feel so ‘less-than.’”
When she was 19, the president of her former label even sat her down and told her she need to lose weight. “It hurt and affected me deeply, but I didn’t want anything to hold me back from moving forward with my career,” she says. “And instead of rebelling or saying ‘Go f-ck yourself,’ I wanted to make myself into a better product.” She dieted, took supplements, and got injections to lose weight that she didn’t need to lose.
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Now, she’s done comparing herself to others. “Trying to measure up to what anyone else seems ‘perfect’ does nothing for my health, mentally or physically, nor does it get me any further in my growth as an artist,” she says. “When I think of all the time I’ve spent uncomfortable in my own skin, wishing I could just hibernate for the winter and come back skinny, I realize I could have channeled that energy and obsession into something much more productive.”
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Now that she’s accepted her body for how it looks, she says the possibilities are endless. “When we focus mostly on our outward appearance, we neglect the important inner-work that must be done and the beautiful life-changing connections we can build with people,” she says.
JoJo ends with this powerful message: “You do not need to conform,” she writes. “You can be your best self, and it may not look like what others expect of you. Give yourself a break. Breathe. You don’t need to make excuses or apologizes for taking up space, taking your time and being true to you. Whether that’s skinny, thick, athletic, chubby, or however you describe yourself…It’s all good. When you accept who you are, it’s only a matter of time before others have no choice but to follow suit.”