Doja Cat has revealed she believes she may have been living with an undiagnosed medical condition for most of her life, one that would explain years of confusion and self-consciousness about her body.
The Paint the Town Red singer, 30, posted a candid late-night TikTok in which she described having an “epiphany” after looking at images of people with lipedema, a chronic condition that causes fat to accumulate abnormally in the legs and arms.
“I was probably at, like, stage one or stage two. And it looks exactly like my legs. Like this looks… These legs look like my legs,” she said.
She added that her mother may also have the condition, which is known to run in families.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, lipedema ranges from stage one, which can cause some pebbling under the skin, to stage four, the most severe, which can cause significant swelling that makes walking difficult.
For Doja, born Amala Dlamini, the potential diagnosis reframed a lifetime of assumptions about her proportions. She had always assumed the accumulation around her legs was cellulite.
“I always thought like, ‘Damn, what’s wrong with me? Like, is something wrong with me? Like, why do people keep pointing at me and gawking at me?'” she said.
She recalled ordering a latex suit for her 2018 Go to Town music video, only to be told by the manufacturers that her measurements “aren’t real.”
The fat, she explained, was concentrated in her thighs, knees, calves, ankles, and buttocks. “I was just building up all this ass, and ankle, and calves, and knee and thigh. I had a whole ton of it.”
In 2023, she publicly confirmed she had undergone liposuction.
She added that she has been wearing tights on stage to manage, and offered a word of caution to anyone considering similar procedures. “It’s a slippery slope, liposuction and things like that.”
