Serena Williams Admits to Struggling With Her ‘Big Boobs’ and ‘Big Butt’ as a Teen

Even the world’s top athletes are not immune to anxiety over their bodies. Tennis superstar Serena Williams is known for her longstanding excellence in the sport, having won four Olympic gold medals and 23 Grand Slam titles. However, she now admits that her youth was plagued with body image struggles, according to an interview with Net-a-Porter’s magazine, Porter.

Williams, 44, told the outlet that the first 15 years of her 27-year professional tennis career were difficult because of constant criticism directed at her appearance. She had a different build compared to the other athletes, she explained, because she had “big boobs” and “a big butt,” adding that “every athlete was super flat, super thin, and beautiful, but in a different way. I didn’t understand as an athlete how to deal with that.”

Williams said the comparisons affected her emotional well-being. “You think you’re large for your whole life, and you look [back], and you’re like, I was fit,” she said. “Yeah, I had big muscles. I didn’t look like these other girls, but not everyone looks the same.”

One thing that has made public scrutiny easier for her, she told Porter, was a decision she made at 17 after winning gold at the US Open for the first time. “I was so young, but I said I’m never going to read anything about me,” she recalled. While the move would go on to protect her from dwelling on intense scrutiny in the news and on social media, its original intent was to keep the tennis star’s ego in check.

“There was so much positivity [at the US Open], and I thought, I don’t want my head to get too big. I wanted to stay humble,” she recalled. “I also thought if it’s negative, I don’t want to read it.”

Critiques of her figure weren’t the only issue Williams dealt with in her youth. “Growing up and being Black in tennis, it’s just like, well, that comes with negativity,” Williams said in the interview. “You have something mean to say, get in line.” Now, she says, she simply tunes out the criticism. “I don’t hear the noise,” she said. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion.”

In August, Williams announced that she was taking weight-loss drugs. She publicly endorsed Ro, a telehealth company that offers semiglutide injections, leading to a spike in GLP-1 appointment bookings—and a flood of criticism over one of the world’s top athletes touting weight-loss medication.

Now that Williams has retired from professional tennis, she said that she enjoys home-cooked meals—a key component of a healthy lifestyle, according to many nutrition experts. “I’m cooking every night that I’m home,” she said. “I’m home 29 nights a month.”