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Entertainment News: Star Jones Admits to Having Gastric-Bypass Surgery

Posted July 31, 2007 - In an interview for the September issue of Glamour magazine, Star Jones finally comes clean about her dramatic weight loss: it was a result of gastric-bypass surgery.

The former "View" co-host opens up about her weight loss and self-esteem issues in the interview on newsstands August 7.  Reynolds, 45, admits that she dodged questions about it for years because she was "scared of what people might think of me." “I was "intentionally evasive" when people asked how she'd dropped 160 pounds in three years.

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Everything about me was already so public (mostly my own doing - talk about dumb!), so of course everyone wanted to know what I had done," said Reynolds. "I was also terrified someone would have a tragic result after emulating me without making an informed decision with her doctor." 

But the complete truth is, I was scared of what people might think of me," she continues. "I was afraid to be vulnerable, and ashamed at not being able to get myself under control without this procedure.

Her decision to keep her decision private made her feel like a hypocrite, especially because she had been so outspoken about her firing from ABC's "The View" last year.

At her heaviest, Reynolds stated that she weighed 307 pounds and that her "out-of-control behavior" began around her 40th birthday in 2002. Feeling lonely, she turned to food for comfort and gained 75 pounds over the course of 17 months. She had the procedure in August 2003. 

I used to look in the mirror and take pride in my figure, but that was when I was legitimately a full-figured woman," she says. "I'd gradually gone from full-figured to morbidly obese." 

After a friend expressed concern about her weight, Reynolds opted for surgery. Although the surgery was a success, she was “still consumed with the same anger, shame and insecurity as before." 

Her husband, banker Al Reynolds, encouraged her to begin psychological therapy in the summer of 2005. She learned, among other things, that she "couldn't control what others thought," she says. She began to heal by talking openly about her weight loss to strangers.

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