As a tennis fan and a Serena Williams fan, I kept paying attention to Serena’s life and times after she retired in September 2022. She spoke, at the time, about wanting to have a second child and that was the main reason for her retirement. Serena welcomed her second daughter, Adira River Ohanian, in August 2023. While Serena’s second pregnancy went a lot smoother than her first, Serena still seemed sort of unsettled after Adira’s birth. We only saw her out in public a few times, and she was really covered up. Then, it seemed like she shed the “baby weight” overnight and she was back to wearing her regular clothes. Many fans theorized that Serena had started taking a GLP-1 drug to get back to her pre-pregnancy figure. Well, that’s exactly what she did and now she’s the face of/ambassador for Ro.
Serena Williams is opening up about the key to her success in her weight-loss journey. The tennis champion, 43, revealed exclusively to PEOPLE that she has been using a GLP-1 medication to help with weight loss and has since lost over 31 lbs.
“I feel great,” she tells PEOPLE. “I feel really good and healthy. I feel light physically and light mentally.”
Williams says her struggle with weight began after she gave birth to her first daughter, Alexis Olympia, in 2017, and her body started to change postpartum. “I never was able to get to the weight I needed to be no matter what I did, no matter how much I trained,” she explains. “It was crazy because I’d never been in a place like that in my life where I worked so hard, ate so healthy and could never get down to where I needed to be at.”
“I had never taken shortcuts in my career and always worked really hard. I know what it takes to be the best,” the 23-time Grand Slam champion says. “So it was very frustrating to do all the same things and never be able to change that number on the scale or the way my body looked.”
Williams dealt with similar struggles after her second daughter, Adira River, was born in August 2023. She was able to lose a lot of weight in two weeks, but then remained stagnant afterwards. “I never lost another pound,” she quips. “I just thought, gosh, I don’t know if I would ever be able to get back to where I needed to get to.”
Knowing that she was great at maintaining a healthy lifestyle as a former professional athlete, Williams decided that it was time to try something different. She decided to turn to Ro, a direct-to-patient healthcare company, for additional support with a GLP-1 treatment. GLP-1 is short for glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, which work in the brain to impact satiety. Popular brands include Ozempic and Mounjaro. Williams recognized that there’s a lot of controversy surrounding the use of GLP-1 medications and admitted that she was very nervous about deciding to use one herself.
“I did a lot of research on it. I was like, ‘is this a shortcut? What are the benefits? What are not the benefits?’ I really wanted to dive into it before I just did it,” she says. After deciding it was the right choice for her, she consulted with a doctor through Ro and was able to start the weekly injections about six months after Adira was born, when she stopped breastfeeding in early 2024.
“They were super supportive and it was easy to get the medication,” Williams, who is now a celebrity patient ambassador for Ro, says. “I lost over 31 pounds using my GLP-1 and I was really excited about that weight loss.”
I already assumed she was taking Ozempic or one of those drugs, so it’s nice to have confirmation of that. And it’s nice that she’s getting paid. Serena loves to be a spokesperson or ambassador, and I think it’s fine that she’s doing this? I assume the money is great. BTW, I think she also wanted to slim down ahead of her special appearance at the Paris Olympics last year. That seemed to be the motivation for her more than anything else – she wanted to wear a cute dress for the opening ceremony.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
