{"id":2836,"date":"2025-08-27T13:18:57","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T13:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/?p=2836"},"modified":"2025-08-27T14:00:54","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:00:54","slug":"serena-williams-her-body-her-journey-our-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/serena-williams-her-body-her-journey-our-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Serena Williams: Her Body, Her Journey, Our Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Serena Williams has always been more than an athlete. She has been a force. The girl with beads in her hair who stepped onto tennis courts never built for her. The woman who carried power, grace, and fire in a body the world did not quite know how to handle. Serena was not just winning matches. She was showing us all a new way to exist\u2026brave, proud, authentic.<\/p>

For years, she gave women and young girls, permission. Permission to be strong. Permission to be different. Permission to succeed without squeezing yourself into someone else\u2019s definition of beauty. She told us, in her own way: you don\u2019t have to shrink to be worthy.<\/em><\/p>

So when Serena announced that she has been taking Ozempic, and even more, that she is now the face of a major campaign promoting it, the news hit hard. Not because she does not have the right to do what feels best for her body. She absolutely does. But because of what that decision communicates when it becomes a global advertisement.<\/p>

The public response was loud and mixed. Some people said, \u201cThis makes Ozempic feel like just another lifestyle product,\u201d and that worried them. Others pointed out the close ties between Serena\u2019s husband and the company behind the campaign, raising eyebrows about whether this was more business than personal. And a lot of us felt let down. We see Serena as the woman who never bowed to narrow standards of beauty. For us, this looked like a step backward.<\/p>

And then there is the impact on young girls. What does it say to a 14-year-old who has Serena plastered on her bedroom wall that even her hero, strong, resilient, world-shaking Serena, still felt she had to be smaller?<\/p>

Let me pause here and share something personal. My mom was a dietitian, and to this day I still hear her voice in my head. \u201cMonifa, eat healthy. Practice moderation. Did you exercise today?\u201d These memories continue to shape how I see wellness, not as a trend or a shortcut, but as a lifelong rhythm of care. And even though it is not always easy, those words still anchor me.<\/p>

But here is my truth: even with that upbringing, it is not always easy. I live in the same world you do, where body image, pressure, and self-doubt show up uninvited. Believing that health is about wholeness and not thinness does not mean I never struggle to stay grounded in that belief. And maybe that is the most honest thing to admit, that even with the best intentions, it takes daily courage to choose compassion over criticism for my own choices about my body.<\/p>

That is why Serena\u2019s words struck me. She said, \u201cI did everything right. I ate healthy. I trained like an Olympian. I reached the pinnacle of sport. And I still could not lose the weight.\u201d<\/p>

To me, that is not a failure. That is just biology. That is the truth about bodies, even the most extraordinary ones. They have a natural set point. They fight to stay in balance. And Serena\u2019s body, the same body that won 23 Grand Slams and carried her through more history than most of us can imagine, was already doing what it was designed to do.<\/p>

The painful part is how that truth got turned into a marketing message. Instead of honoring what it revealed, that worth does not come from a number on a scale, it became another story of lack. Another pitch that says: no matter how brilliant, disciplined, or world-changing you are, you still need to be smaller.<\/p>

And that is the message girls everywhere are internalizing.<\/p>

In Dakar, in Detroit, in Delhi, young women are already carrying enormous pressure. In some places, they are told to be curvy enough to prove their womanhood. In others, they are told to be thin enough to prove their discipline. Everywhere, their bodies are measured, judged, and picked apart. And now they see even Serena being \u201cfixed.\u201d<\/p>

That is why this conversation matters. Because Serena\u2019s influence is massive. Because her greatness lived in her strength, her strategy, and her will \u2026 never in her measurements.. It lived in her courage. In her fierce determination. In the audacity to dominate a sport that tried to box her out. She changed history in the body she already had.<\/p>

Serena\u2019s choice is her own, and I honor that. But how we speak about it, how we let it shape the culture around us, that belongs to us. We can choose to tell a different story, one that lifts up young girls instead of weighing them down. A story that reminds them their worth is not measured against impossible standards. If they grow up knowing their heroes were already enough, then maybe they will believe they are too.<\/p>

\u2014
Monifa Pendelton<\/em>
Founder, The Third<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Par Monifa Pendelton<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2836"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2844,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions\/2844"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thethird.africa\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}