John Salangsang/Shutterstock
Raven-Symone Reveals She Got Liposuction and Breast Reductions After Being Weight-Shamed as a Teen
Raven-Symoné was a Disney Channel fan-favorite in the early 2000s, but her fame came with a downside. After being weight-shamed during her teenage years, Raven opted to get plastic surgery — undergoing breast reductions and liposuction.
“I had two breast reductions and lipo before I turned 18,” Raven, 37, told her wife, Miranda Pearman-Maday, during an episode of their podcast, “The Best Podcast Ever With Raven and Miranda,” on Sunday, August 6. “There was paperwork involved.”
The Raven’s Home star then revealed that her father, Christopher Pearman, encouraged her to go for the surgery after she was bullied for her body size.
“My dad suggested strongly that I should get my breasts reduced,” Raven explained during the episode. “He was like, ‘So you don’t feel bad, is there anything that you want?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, if I get lipo, will people stop calling me fat?’ So I got a twofer. It was just a mess, just being that young and the pain of it all.”
After undergoing her first breast reduction, Raven thought that her chest was “still too big” from weight gain and decided to go for another procedure. However, the surgery ended up being traumatic for the That’s So Raven alum, as she described experiencing a seizure shortly after the operation.
“I remember waking up and seeing everything, and then I just started to have this dry mouth and couldn’t breathe and went back under,” Raven recalled, before admitting that not knowing the specific cause of the seizure still “freaks her out a bit.”
More than a year prior, Raven opened up on The View about how wife Miranda, 36, helped her lose 40 pounds by going on a zero-sugar diet.
“With her help and guidance and love and fantastic cooking skills, she helped me kick sugar,” Raven said at the time. “I say ‘kick sugar’ because it is an addictive drug, and I was addicted to it in wheat form, in regular form. And it’s out of my system. What made me want to change was her.”
Raven’s decision to lose weight also resulted from a visit to her doctor, where she discovered “some numbers” that “were not pleasant for someone in [her] age bracket or any age bracket.”
“[Miranda] doesn’t want to take me to an early grave and I want to make sure I am there for her in the best health possible,” Raven added at the time.
Raven and Miranda first met in 2015 but kept their romance out of the public eye for several years. However, that changed in June 2020 when the couple got married. Since then, they have gushed over each other on social media, and Raven has openly talked about their relationship in public appearances. During an April 2022 visit to The Tamron Hall Show, Raven revealed that Miranda hadn’t watched any of her TV shows before they met, which the Cheetah Girls star thought was “fantastic.”
“Imagine being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t look at you like a famous person even though you have been famous your whole entire life. You get to be seen,” Raven said. “And Miranda provided me with a reality with an honest conversation to the point where she forgets that I’m Raven-Symoné or doesn’t even consider me that person.”
