Selena Gomez opens up about lupus diagnosis and being body-shamed: "It was the first time I've ever been called fat"
Now that Selena Gomez has revealed her lupus diagnosis, she is letting everyone know even more details about her secret, which she kept for a few years.
"I was diagnosed with lupus, and I've been through chemotherapy. That's what my break was really about. I could've had a stroke," Gomez admitted to Billboard magazine.
"I wanted so badly to say, 'You guys have no idea. I'm in chemotherapy. You're assholes.' I locked myself away until I was confident and comfortable again," she recalled.
Appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Friday, Selena further explains why she kept her autoimmune disease a secret for three years, even when tabloids speculated she was in rehab for some sort of addiction. "I mean that's when I found it," she tells host Ellen DeGeneres, "and I think it was just very complicated because I didn't understand and then that was something that I did want to keep private until my whole life suddenly wasn't private."
But with her new album, Revival, getting released Friday morning, it finally became the perfect opportunity for Selena to come clean about everything—hence her revival.
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"So it was my moment," she explains. "I'm really honestly able to relate to people and I get it."
Selena also faced some hard times earlier this year when a photo of her in a bikini made its way around the Internet. It appeared that the "Good for You" singer had put on a little weight, and the Internet being the Internet, people attacked. "It was the first time I'd ever been called fat," she confesses.
"But it was weird because it's not just oh she's fat. It's like she's a mess. She's gone off the deep end," she adds. "I'm like because I'm on a vacation wearing a bathing suit? Actually technically that is a little too small for me, but I didn't care."
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She didn't roll over and take it. Instead she shared the picture herself and let everyone know she was happy with her appearance.
"I don't what them to win. It's so annoying when I see it all over the place and everybody thinks they can bring me down," she says. "So my immediate response was I'm gonna post a picture and I'm like 'I'm happy with me ya'll' and that was going to be the story the next day.
"I wasn't going to let that be the story."
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