Star Jones Reynolds: Back and Better Than Ever
Star Jones Reynolds also explains why she's talking about her weight loss now.
Aug. 17, 2007 — -- After a year out of the spotlight, Star Jones Reynolds is once again ready for her close-up and she's finally admitting the secret behind her dramatic, 160-pound weight loss: gastric bypass surgery.
"I had always been this girl out there who said I would die fat and happy," she told ABC's Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America." "What a lie."
The lawyer and former co-host of ABC's "The View" first opened up about her surgery, which she underwent four years ago, in an interview with Glamour magazine. On "GMA," Reynolds explained why she had covered up the truth for so long.
"[I was] scared of what other people would think. … For some strange reason, I thought — and it crippled me — that it would diminish who I was," she said. "Everything about my life was so public, mostly through my own doing. … When I lost weight, I somehow thought I was just going to say I'm going to be private about it."
Though she's a bold and assertive personality on screen, Reynolds said she needed extensive therapy in order to begin talking openly about her weight loss surgery.
"I wish I could explain what emotionally crippling control is," she said. "It took me a long time in therapy to be honest with you, to open up."
To quell media speculation about her plummeting weight, Reynolds used the term "medical intervention" to describe the method she used to shed pounds in a 2006 interview.
"It would have been so much easier to just say I had this weight loss surgery," she said. "But I couldn't do it."
Reynolds also admitted that since undergoing gastric bypass surgery, she's had a breast lift and surgery to remove excess skin on her stomach. A size 26 in 2003, Jones Reynolds now wears a size 8. But she said surgery isn't the sole explanation for her new figure.
After years of defending her weight, Reynolds is under fire from critics who say that her confession seems a bit too conveniently pegged to the debut of her new Court TV show. She's been accused of turning her personal experience into a publicity stunt abound, and it's an accusation she does not deny.
