Even sporting legends fall for our obsession with thinness

Weight-loss drugs have their first global ambassador: Serena Williams. The tennis great has signed on as the face of Ro, a telehealth company prescribing GLP-1 weight loss drugs, and where her husband, Alexis Ohanian, is a board member.

- ALEX LIGHT

Announcing the partnership, she told Women's Health: "I am a very good use case of how you can do everything - eat healthy, work out to the point of even playing a professional sport and getting to the finals of Wimbledon and US Opens - and still not be able to lose weight."

That quote stopped me in my tracks. This is a woman who has spent decades redefining what female strength looks like: powerful, muscular and unapologetic. A 23-time grand slam winner. And yet, she frames her body as having failed her - not because it couldn't dominate world sport or bear children or inspire millions, but because it wouldn't shrink on demand. It is a brutal reminder that even the most accomplished women remain trapped by society's obsession with thinness.

Here's something else I can't shake about her statement: if even at this point, after years of peak training, discipline and sacrifice, Serena “couldn’t” lose weight, maybe that's because she wasn't supposed to. Maybe that was simply her body operating as and where it was meant to. The idea that natural biology is a problem to be solved is precisely what keeps us all - and let's be honest, mainly women - stuck in relentless cycles of correction.