“Dance Moms” star Abby Lee Miller has lost around 127 pounds, and on Monday, September 21, she turned 61. She shared a video of herself in a wheelchair, onstage, holding a cake and blowing out a candle. She looks great! Miller has transformed her appearance, and she looks very different from how fans of the hit Lifetime series may remember her.
Abby Lee Miller’s Weight Loss Journey
In a 2015 interview with People, Miller discussed how she began her weight loss journey after being diagnosed with the onset of diabetes. “I had to get a prescription refilled – lo and behold, there’s something different about that prescription in Australia,” she said. “I would take this medicine and within an hour, I was vomiting like I was in fourth grade and had the flu or like I had food poisoning. It was awful. After I would throw up, I couldn’t even look at food for the rest of the day.”
She added, “So that is how I lost the weight. There’s no diet, there’s no exercise, there’s no this, there’s no that.” People reports that she dropped from a size 24 to a size 16.
In a 2015 interview with ExtraTV, Miller revealed she had not intended to lose weight, but that she had been busy caring for her ailing mother in hospice. “I think the last six months, we were just trying to get her to eat, and the last two months people just kept bringing stuff, she was in hospice care, and you bring all of her favorites from restaurants, different fast food places, and it would make her sick,” she said.
Getty
GettyShe continued, “She couldn’t even look at it. She didn’t want to smell, so I didn’t take food in with me to eat ’cause it was making her nauseous. Her illness and just her not wanting to eat, I wasn’t eating either.” In the interview, she also echoed the comments she made to People about her prescription medicine and her diabetes diagnosis.
Abby Lee Miller’s Surgery
In 2018, Entertainment Tonight reported that the year before, in 2017, Miller had undergone gastric bypass surgery. The procedure reduced her stomach by 80 percent. “I think this is the right time,” she said. “People are saying, ‘But your sentencing is coming up in a couple weeks!’ And that is true, and I’m really nervous about that, more than the surgery, but there’s no right time.”
The sentencing she referred to is when she spent time in the Federal Correctional Complex in Victorville, California, after pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud in June 2016.
Of spending time behind bars, Miller told Entertainment Tonight she saw it as an opportunity to focus on herself. “I’ve always put everybody else’s child first before my own health, before my own outfit, before my own time frame,” she said. “Everybody else was dressed and out the door and looking perfect, and I was running around trying to find a clean towel to take a shower with, so I think this will be a little ‘me’ time.”
