Lizzo’s Best Quotes About Body Positivity & Beauty Standards

Lizzo is a trailblazer. When she’s not dropping chart-topping bangers like “Truth Hurts” and “Good As Hell,” she’s working on her mental health and encouraging fans to love their bodies. “There was no Lizzo before Lizzo,” the three-time Grammy winner said in a cover story for PEOPLE’s Women Changing the World Issue, in which she shared her experience with learning “how America treats Black people, how it treats Black women, and how we treat fat people.”

Lizzo, 33, wasn’t always as confident and positive as she is now. Born Melissa Jefferson in Houston, Lizzo learned to play the flute in fifth grade and was a self-proclaimed “nerd.” In 2017, she released “Truth Hurts,” and it went viral as a TikTok before being featured in Netflix’s Someone Great.

“I think I have a really hot body! I’m a body icon, and I’m embracing that more and more every day. It may not be one person’s ideal body type just like, say, Kim Kardashian might not be someone’s ideal, but sh’'s a body icon and has created a modern-day beauty standard,” the “Juice” singer told PEOPLE. “And what I’m doing is stepping into my confidence and my power to create my own beauty standard, and one day that will just be the standard.”

This isn’t the first time Lizzo has been an advocate for body positivity. Though she’s found ways to love herself, she knows that it’s always a work in progress. Here are some of Lizzo’s best quotes on self-love, the body-positive movement, and social media’s influence on it all.

On Taking Care Of Your Body

• “Any body is a good place to be if you listen to it, take care of it. I am, for the first time ever, actually listening to it and giving it everything that it wants. From vitamins to positive reinforcement, to sunlight to rest. It’s being nice to me back.” Dove ‘What’s Underneath Project’, 2015

On Body Politics

• “It’s not a political statement. It’s just my body. When you see it, keep it pushing. Keep that same energy that you keep with all the other bodies you see. That’s what body normative really means to me. I’m here, don’t say anything. It’s not a statement. It’s my body.” —PEOPLE, 2021

On The Body-Positive Movement

• “Yes, please be positive about your body. Please use our movement to empower yourselves. That’s the point. But the people who created this movement — big women, big brown and Black women, queer women — are not benefiting from the mainstream success of it.” —TikTok, 2021

• “The body-positive movement is the body-positive movement, and we high five. We’re parallel. But my movement is my movement. When all the dust has settled on the groundbreaking-ness, I’m going to still be doing this. I’m not going to suddenly change. I’m going to still be telling my life story through music. And if that’s body-positive to you, amen. That’s feminist to you, amen. If that’s pro-black to you, amen. Because ma’am, I’m all of those things.” —Allure, 2019

On Media Influence

• “I would watch things on television and I would look at magazines and I would not see myself. When you don't see yourself, you start to think something’s wrong with you. Then you want to look like those things and when you realize it’s a physical impossibility, you start to think, ‘What the f**k is wrong with me?’ I think that took a greater toll on me, psychologically, growing up than what anyone could have said to me.” —British Vogue, 2019
• “Everyone looks to an artist for something more than just the music, and that message of being comfortable in my own skin is No. 1 for me.” —Billboard, 2018
• “It’s not a label I wanted to put on myself. It’s just my existence. All these fucking hashtags to convince people that the way you look is fine. Isn’t that f**king crazy? I say I love myself, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s so brave. She’s so political.’ For what? All I said is ‘I love myself, b**ch!’ Even when body positivity is over, it’s not like I’m going to be a thin white woman. I’m going to be black and fat. That’s just hopping on a trend and expecting people to blindly love themselves. That’s fake love. I’m trying to figure out how to actually live it.” —The Cut, 2019

On Normalizing All Bodies

• “I love creating shapes with my body, and I love normalizing the dimples in my butt or the lumps in my thighs or my back fat or my stretch marks. I love normalizing my Black-a** elbows. I think it’s beautiful.” —Essence, 2020
• “I’m all about body positivity and self-love because I believe that we can save the world if we first save ourselves.” —Red Room show in Sydney, Australia, 2020

On Her Personal Experience

• “I don’t think that loving yourself is a choice. I think that it’s a decision that has to be made for survival; it was in my case. Loving myself was the result of answering two things: Do you want to live? ’Cause this is who you’re gonna be for the rest of your life. Or are you gonna just have a life of emptiness, self-hatred and self-loathing? And I chose to live, so I had to accept myself. That's the first step: Acceptance. And acceptance is hard. I'm still accepting myself every day; I'm still working on it.” —NBC News, 2019
• “I believe that because of my own experiences I had to learn that women who are bigger experience the same type of mental oppression that smaller women do. I think that women, in general, are really marginalized and programmed to believe that we aren’t good enough — even the ones that we’re like, ‘She has everything.’” —Junkee, 2019

On Being A Sex Symbol

• “I didn’t have enough women to look up to and they weren’t given enough space in the industry to carve out a lane for big girls that are brown and Black and want to sing and dance without getting sh*t talked and body shamed. I’m out here and I set my mind to it. I want to be a sex symbol and music goddess and I’m out here trying to make that happen for myself. I’m here for the fantasy but I want to be a part of that fantasy. I’m just as fine as those girls.” —Vogue, 2019