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PRESSURE COOKER

Comedian Says Rapid 30-Lb. Weight Loss Led to Health Nightmare

She was prescribed a dangerous diet drug that went on to trigger a long-lasting health crisis.

Tamilore OshikanluContributor

PublishedJul 2, 2026, 3:16 PM EDT

UpdatedJul 2, 2026, 8:40 PM EDT

Updated Jul 2, 2026, 8:40 PM EDTPublished Jul 2, 2026, 3:16 PM EDT

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Comedian Margaret Cho says she was pushed into a brutal weight-loss spiral and health crisis after producers told her she was “too fat” to play herself.

The actress opened up on The Person Who Believed in Me podcast this week about starring in the groundbreaking 1994 ABC sitcom All-American Girl. Despite playing a fictionalized version of herself, she was still told her body was a problem.

“They wanted me to be a lot less fat,” Cho said, noting that the “main criticism” was of her body. She added, “They were like, ‘You’re way too fat to be you.’”

Cho said the reaction from executives left her baffled, especially because she had assumed her career as a comedian would shield her from Hollywood’s punishing beauty standards.

“I always had body issues, but because I was a comedian, I thought, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to worry about that, because we don’t care about whether comedians are fat or not,’” she said.

Instead, her weight became a fixation behind the scenes. Cho said executives were “freaking out” over her body, which caused her to shirk her writing responsibilities and pour all her energy into quickly dropping weight.

Cho said producers told her they simply wanted the show to have the “best chance” possible in an era when television was still obsessed with ultra-thin bodies. The scrutiny, she said, was not really proof that she was overweight—it was proof of the time.

“The main criticism from everyone was that I was just too fat,” she said. “And that didn’t mean that I was actually fat. It was just the time.”

The pressure quickly turned dangerous. Cho said she was put on Fen-Phen, the once-popular 1990s weight-loss drug combination of fenfluramine and phentermine, and dropped 30 pounds in just two weeks.

The side effects were horrifying. Cho said she suffered kidney failure, sudden hair loss, and symptoms so severe that she recalled urinating blood in her trailer.

But even that apparently did not alarm executives as much as the possibility that she might stop dieting.

“They’re like, ‘That’s fine, but just don’t get the weight back,’” Cho said. “It was more terrifying that I was gonna have to stop dieting than it was that I was sick.”

Cho described the experience as “rough,” though she also gave some grace to the people around the show, saying they were working from focus-group feedback and a narrow understanding of what television success looked like at the time.

The show itself was a milestone: Cho became the first Asian American woman to headline a primetime ABC sitcom. But the pressure surrounding it helped send her into what she described as a devastating downward spiral.

Cho, who identifies as a “people pleaser” with an “addictive personality,” said she kept chasing other ways to lose weight after Fen-Phen was pulled from the market in 1997 following reports of serious heart valve problems and pulmonary hypertension.

In an interview on the How to Fail podcast, Cho said she began “taking all these weird drugs that would just make you s---,” with consequences that were sometimes humiliatingly public.

She recalled wearing an all-white dress to a comedy show and losing control of her bowels near the end of the performance, leaving a stain down the back of the dress.

Her decline eventually became so severe that Cho voluntarily entered treatment for almost two years, where she received therapy and help for substance abuse.

“If you have an addictive personality, you just set yourself up completely to fail,” she said. “For me, whether it was food or alcohol or drugs, whatever it was, it’s going to be destructive.”

Cho said she has now kept those struggles “contained” for more than a decade.

“That is really good,” she said. “I hope to keep it that way.”

Tamilore OshikanluContributor

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