After her breakthrough on TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras at the age of five, Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson dealt with cameras following her and her family for the next decade. The fiesty pageant princess became the focus of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and then multiple spin-offs followed, which focused on her mother, Mama June’s, drastic weight loss and addiction. Now, at 19, Thompson is following her own path and studying to become a nurse.
As her Lifetime biopic, I Was Honey Boo Boo, is about to be released, Thompson is looking back at the ups and downs of her life, including her sister’s death. She’s also taking an honest look at her mom’s extreme weight loss when she was a young girl, and how that damaged her self-esteem.
Thompson Reveals the Real Toll of Her Mom’s Massive Weight Loss
“I feel like Mama’s physical transformation, it didn’t take as much of a toll on my life as, like, now looking back, as I realize, just because, like I said, I was young,” Thompson told People. “But now I’m looking back and I’m like, ‘That was crazy.’ That was a dramatic change, and I didn’t know how to even think of my mom. My mom went from being 300 lbs. to 100 lbs, it looked like. And it was kind of scary.”
“As a young girl, I think that, like, took a big toll on body image for me,” she went on. “Just because my mama was a bigger girl, and her having to get surgery and shrink down to this one size. Like, I thought in my head, ‘Oh, am I going to have to do that one day, because I’m a bigger girl? Like, am I going to have to, like, be in this perfect picture and get surgery so I’m like this skinny little model? It definitely did take a toll on my self-image, for sure.”
Thompson Had a Strong Reaction to Mama June’s Transformation
Thompson may finally realize the impression her mom’s transformation from a size 24 to a size four had on her young self, but some of her initial comments showed her confusion. “I have a new mom,” Thompson told ABC News then. “Well, it’s not like a new mom, it’s just she has a new body … It’s like they cut off her head and then put it on another body.”
There were also signs that it was negatively affecting how she felt about her own body. When Thompson was 16, having weight loss surgery was already heavy on her mind. In an interview with ET in 2022, she admitted that she was considering getting a suture-sculpt endoscopic sleeve to reduce her weight from 275 pounds to 150 pounds.
“I just wanna make sure that this is actually something I wanna do before I just go and do it,” Alana said. “I wanna make sure that it’s, like, not something that’s, like, gonna kill me. And I just wanna make sure it’s something I actually wanna do before I go and do it.” The teenager admitted that she knew diet and exercise could get her results, but felt that “the surgery would be, like, probably the easiest way to just, like, lose it fast.”
The post Honey Boo Boo Breaks Silence on the Affect of Mama June’s Dramatic Weight Loss appeared first on EntertainmentNow.