Alexa Lemieux is getting real about the criticisms she’s faced about her weight.
As fans most likely will recall, the 27-year-old reality star was a contestant on season three of Love Is Blind, during which she found love in the pods with her now-husband Brennon Lemieux. While many fans went wild for their sweet love story on the show, she also received a ton of love from people for being the first ever curvy contestant on the Netflix show and embracing her body. Although Alexa is glad she helped many people feel seen at the time, she also felt the audience and show focused and commented so much on her weight despite the fact that she is not considered “plus-sized.” She explained on the Betches’ Diet Starts Tomorrow podcast on Sunday:
“I love so much that I can represent a very normal sized figure. People act like I’m this massive human being. I am a size eight to 10, like I am below average in America.”
Related: Zanab Jaffrey Reveals The ‘Forever Love’ She’s Found In The Pods!
For Alexa, she was mainly upset by the comments she received praising Brennon for loving her “in spite of” how she looked:
“The thing that I dislike the most is that people say, ‘Brennon loves me, in spite of my body.’ That sucks. Like what? No, he loves me and my body. It was never a concern.”
In fact, she shared that she asked her hubby if he was “attracted to” her after they got engaged and saw each other for the first time. His response? Alexa revealed:
“He said, ‘Hell yeah, I love that you’re curvy. You look good.’”
Despite receiving Brennon’s support, the insurance agency owner confessed she was very worried about receiving negative comments about her body before the season dropped last year. She recalled opening up about the matter to her partner, saying:
“This is going to be a big deal for people. People are not gonna like my body. They’re gonna have a fundamental issue with my body. He was like, ‘I don’t understand why are you, like, so nervous about it. And I’m like it’s gonna suck to have a bunch of people comment on my body. That sucks. No one’s gonna look at your body and be like, ‘He eats this,’ but people are gonna do that to me.”
Ugh! That’s very frustrating.
During the pods, though, Alexa was not even nervous about her physical appearance at first. However, that changed when someone asked her if she was worried about Brennon’s reaction before their reveal:
“I can’t remember exactly how they brought it up…It was kind of brought up right before the reveal, like ‘Are you nervous how he is going to react to your body?’ I was like, ‘No…That wasn’t a concern, but it is now.’ I didn’t really think about it until that moment.”
Awful. She should not have been made to feel like she should have been concerned about her body in the moment. While Alexa was very body positive on the show, she wasn’t always confident about her figure growing up:
“It’s definitely something that took time. I don’t think that everyone’s born with confidence overnight and I definitely still have days where I hate myself and I think that’s perfectly normal.”
She added:
“I have been really skinny before. When I went through an episode of being very, very, very depressed, I went down to almost a size four. I was very skinny, and that was when I was my unhappiest self. I hated my life. I hated myself… Skinny does not equal healthy and that is such a difficult thing for people to understand.”
Say it louder for everyone!
Reactions to Alexa’s candid conversation, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments below.
[Image via Love Is Blind/Netflix, Alexa Lemieux/Instagram]