Shonda Rhimes Opens Up About the Moment She Decided to Get Her Weight Under Control

Choosing to risk her life flying on an airplane with no seatbelt was the wakeup call she needed to lose 100 pounds.

For Shonda Rhimes, choosing to risk her life flying on an airplane with no seatbelt was the wakeup call she needed to lose 100 pounds.

Sitting down on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the queen of ABC’s TGIT, opened up about her dramatic weight loss and the moment she decided to get her health under control.


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“I got on an airplane, I was going to NY from LA and it was first class and it was going to be really comfortable,” the Scandal creator, 45, explained. “I got in my seat, I took off my shoes I got out by book and I went to buckle the seatbelt and it wouldn’t buckle and I thought to myself, something is wrong with the seatbelt, it’s broken. But it wasn’t the seatbelt it was me.”

It hit Rhimes at that moment that she needed a seatbelt extender but she was too embarrassed to ask for one.

“I decided I will risk it and not say anything,” she revealed on the show.

The How To Get Away With Murder producer also contributes her successful weight loss to her year where all she said was yes, which she chronicles in her book Year of Yes.


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“It was a crazy bi-product somehow of doing [the year of yes],” she explained to Degeneres. “The more fears I conquered, the more I felt like I can do this too or I can do that too. And so I lost weight.”

When it came to losing the weight, Rhimes admitted in a previous interview that "nothing is 100 percent fun all the time."

"But I have never not done something with a pointed focus," she continued. To see what else the star has to say about her dramatic transformation watch the video below.

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