Melissa McCarthy Responds to Barbara Streisand’s Ozempic Question
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Barbara Streisand commented on Melissa McCarthy’s recent Instagram, asking if McCarthy took Ozempic, the weight loss drug.
McCarthy’s post pictured her en route to a theatre gala in Los Angeles over the weekend.
The 53-year-old has previously shared her thoughts about discussing weight.
On Monday, Melissa McCarthy shared a photo of herself en route to a gala in Los Angeles in which she wore head-to-toe mint green; a ruffled dress and sleek blazer. Most fans flocked to the comments to compliment her radiance, but what singer Barbara Streisand wrote caught the world off-guard—Streisand asked McCarthy if she took Ozempic, the type 2 diabetes drug popular, in part, for its weight loss side effect. Though the comment was deleted, McCarthy responded—showing no ill will to the iconic singer. But what has McCarthy said about weight loss in the past? She’s consistently chosen to focus on body positivity and overall health.
Below, we set the record straight on exactly where McCarthy stands on dieting and weight loss—and how, naturally, she’s made her point of view funny along the way.
She loves that Barbara Streisand “thinks I look good”
In response to Streisand’s Ozempic question, McCarthy posted a video with the caption: “@Barbarastreisand fan club members only.” She said her takeaway from the singer’s comments were that: “Barbara Streisand knows I exist. She reached out to me and she thought I looked good. I win the day.”
At 53, McCarthy leans into self-acceptance
You may recall that The Little Mermaid Star was honored in People’s 2023 Beautiful Issue. And while she, of course, had to make a joke about the acknowledgment (“Did my mom and my dad have the two main votes?”), she shared that, in all seriousness, her glow comes from contentment. “Somewhere in my 30s, I was like ‘I’m okay with who I am,’” she told People. “And if someone wasn’t thrilled with that, that’s okay too. At some point, I was like, ‘They’re not all going to like you.’ You have to learn that the hard way, but it’s a good [lesson].”
Her weight has fluctuated since she moved to Hollywood
It’s not necessarily anyone’s business what a scale reads when McCarthy steps on it, but she has shared that her weight has fluctuated since she moved to Los Angeles in the ’90s. Her lifestyle changed significantly after she joined the improv troupe The Groundlings. “I stopped walking and ate shitty food. I was in good shape, then suddenly I gained 25 pounds,” she told Rolling Stone in 2017.
Since then, she’s “been every size in the world,” she told Us Weekly in 2013. “Parts of my 20s, I was in great shape, but I didn’t appreciate it. If I was a six or an eight, I thought, ‘Why aren’t I a two or a four?’ Now I feel like I have two great kids and the dreamiest husband on the planet, and everything else is just a work in progress.”
She fell into the trap of fad dieting
After securing her role as Sookie St. James in Gilmore Girls in the early 2000s, McCarthy went on a doctor-advised all-liquid diet, which led her to lose 70 pounds. “I’d never do that again,” she told People in 2011. “I felt starved and crazy half the time.”
Red carpet designers declined to dress her
“When I go shopping, most of the time I’m disappointed,” she told Redbook in 2014. “Two Oscars ago, I couldn’t find anybody to do a dress for me. I asked five or six designers—very high-level ones who make lots of dresses for people—and they all said no.”
After too many of those experiences, McCarthy took matters into her own hands. She has designed clothes for Lane Bryant and launched her own Melissa McCarthy Seven7 line in 2015, which is no longer in production.
“Seventy percent of women in the United States are a size 14 or above, and that’s technically ‘plus-size,’ so you’re taking your biggest category of people and telling them, ‘You’re not really worthy.’ I find that very strange,” she told Refinery29 in 2015. “I just think, if you’re going to make women’s clothing, make women’s clothing.”
In 2019, she told WSJ magazine that she was working on a more accessible label, but no news has come of it since.
Body shame set in when she was young...
“I do think I worried about weight too soon, when it was only little-kid weight,” she told Rolling Stone. “I thought I battled weight throughout high school, but I look back at pictures of me as a cheerleader, doing sprints, lifting weights, doing gymnastics, playing tennis, and while I wasn’t reed-thin like some girls... I was a size six the entire time. So what on Earth was I freaking out about?”
...Which is why she wants to change the conversation for today’s youth
In 2016, McCarthy shared an image of a mirror with a warning label on Instagram. The label read: “Reflections in this mirror may be distorted by societally constructed ideas of beauty.”
In her caption, she wrote: “We have to stop categorizing and judging women based on their bodies. We are teaching young girls to strive for unattainable perfection instead of feeling healthy and happy in their own skin.”
Even when she lost 50 pounds, you didn’t see her celebrating
Headlines exploded over McCarthy’s 50-pound weight loss in 2015 which happened in tandem with her action-packed role in Spy. Ironically, she said the weight left when she stopped obsessing over it. “I truly stopped worrying about it,” she told Life & Style. “I think there’s something to kinda loosening up and not being so nervous and rigid about it that, bizarrely, has worked.”
Even then, she cautioned the public not to get too... excited about the change. “I have [lost weight], but I’ll be back again," she told Refinery29 in 2016. “I’ll be up, I’ll be down, probably for the rest of my life. The thing is, if that is the most interesting thing about me, I need to go have a lavender farm in Minnesota and give this up. There has to be something more.”
She’s quick to point out that men aren’t as scrutinized for their size
McCarthy has been open about the egregious questions she’s received on her physical appearance over the years—and the double standard that exists when it comes to men in Hollywood and their looks. “There are so many more intriguing things about women than their butt or their this or their that. It can’t be the first question every time, or a question at all,” she told Refinery 29. “It’s like, ‘Can you imagine them asking some of these guys I work with, ‘How do you keep your butt looking so good?’ It would be like, ‘What the f*ck are you talking about? Why are you asking about the shape of my butt?’”
In a 2018 interview with AARP, she shared a similar sentiment. “No one’s asking a man, how do you keep your legs in shape? Which I’ve been asked,” she recalled.
She doesn’t want weight to define her
In fact, she doesn’t want it to define anyone. “I just find it dumb and boring. I really do,” she told AARP. “I think every time we categorize people—by weight, by race, by gender—we put them in boxes and it’s not a good thing for the world.”
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