Selena Gomez reflects on her physical changes: "I'm not perfect, but I'm proud of being who I am"

“Today I realized that I will never see myself like this again…” wrote Selena Gomez this Tuesday, January 23, on her Instagram stories.

Accompanying her words, she published a photograph from 2013 in which she appears in a zebra print bikini at 21 years old.

The next story is her again, also in a bikini, in a recent image of her at 31 years old, a decade later.

“I'm not perfect, but I'm proud to be who I am... Sometimes I forget that it's okay to be me,” she reflects in this second image.

The singer, actress, producer and businesswoman—she has a makeup brand, Rare Beauty—has made a new plea about body positivity, and it's not the first time.

She already did it in February of last year after she had to go to social media to address the many comments that were being generated around her weight gain.

Far from staying silent, what she did was silence the mouths of the users who criticized her, revealing that it is due to the medication she has been taking for years to treat the lupus she suffers from.

“I tend to retain fluids and that happens very often,” she explained on TikTok.

“I just wanted to encourage anyone who feels any kind of shame about what they're going through, that no one knows the real story.

I want people to know that they are beautiful and wonderful.

Yes, we have days when we feel bad, but I prefer to be healthy and take care of myself, and my medications are important and I think they help me.

So, well, I'm not a model and I never will be,” she confessed to her legion of followers (she has 429 million on Instagram and more than 59 million on TikTok).

“I just wanted to tell you that I love you and thank you for supporting me and understanding me.

And if you don't do it, you can leave, because I honestly don't think people should be shamed for that [their bodies],” she said.

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Selena Gomez in a bikini in October 2013, aged 21.

This is the image that she has now shared on her Instagram stories.infusmi-11/13 (INFphoto.com/Cordon Press)

In October, the Just Murders in the Building

actress

also opened up about coming under scrutiny after undergoing surgery — she had a kidney transplant and chemotherapy — following her lupus diagnosis.

Gomez, who was 23 when she learned of her autoimmune disease (in 2015), recalled feeling like she “no longer had the body of a teenager” during a dress fitting for a magazine, which also left her self-conscious. .

“None of the sample sizes were right, and that made me feel embarrassed,” she confessed in an interview with

Fast Company

.

“Although, how unrealistic is it to expect a normal woman's body not to change?” she suggested.

A few months after her operation, she was caught in a bikini during a getaway to Australia and social media was soon flooded with comments about her visible scars.

In addition, it coincided with her breakup with singer Justin Bieber, after eight years of relationship.

“My heart had just been broken,” she said in that same interview

:

“I didn't need to see what everyone was saying about me.”

It was at that stage, in 2018, when the former Disney star entered a psychosis that led her to register at a treatment center, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Selena Gomez (@selenagomez)

Social networks have not been a good ally for the artist in that sense either.

“Then there were those moments where I didn't feel positive about how I looked because of what I saw on Instagram.

She was thinking, '

Wow

, I wish my body looked like that again,'” she said in October.

In fact, she admitted that staying away from social media had helped alleviate her anxiety and she went so far as to give her passwords to her assistant in 2017 to delete the apps from her phone.

This year it seemed like history was repeating itself.

At the beginning of 2024, the singer of hits like

Lose You to Love Me

shared a status with her followers in which she warned that she would leave social networks for a season in order to focus on her life.

“I will be off the grid for a while.

“I’m focusing on what really matters,” she wrote alongside a video with her new boyfriend, producer Benny Blanco.

18 hours later, she was back on Instagram.