Cheryl Burke Recalls Getting Body Shamed By 'The Nation' In Early 'DWTS' Seasons

"Dancing With The Stars" pro Cheryl Burke recently opened up about her struggle with body dysmorphia. Burke talked about her relationship with her body during an interview with Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali on the "Hypchondriactor" podcast.

Burke had previously opened up about her struggles with her body image in a YouTube video in 2020. She also spoke about how people called her fat and criticized her body a lot during some seasons of "Dancing With The Stars.

Read on to find out more.

During her interview with Hayes and Dr. Wali (Via Yahoo Life) Burke spoke about her body image as a professional dancer and revealed that she had struggled with body dysmorphia for years. She said, "I suffer from social anxiety now that I'm sober, I have body dysmorphia because I'm a dancer. I mean, tell me one dancer that doesn't."

Burke had previously spoken about her body image in a YouTube video titled "My Struggles with Body Image." In the video, she revealed that for a long time, it had been difficult for her to feel comfortable in her skin.

She went into more detail on this in the podcast. She said, "When I look at myself in the mirror and someone says, 'Oh, you look amazing' I see someone who is overweight and in my eyes and in my way of judging myself, not amazing. So it's like no matter what I look like."

Burke explained that although she is somewhat used to the experience, she eventually realized it was a big problem when she revisited older seasons of "DWTS." She said, "I was pretty skinny and yet I was still giving wardrobe hassle in our fittings. Like meaning not hassling them, more like, 'Ugh I feel like shit' or 'Oh my god look at my fat roll.' It's so ridiculous."

Burke revealed that it eventually got so bad that she couldn't get the thoughts out of her head. To make matters worse, her negative internal thoughts were being reinforced by the negative public conversations about her body.

Burke spoke about the negative public ideas about her body. She said, "The nation decided to call me fat about season seven or eight when I actually got off my birth control and I retained 15 pounds of water weight, which I thought was obviously going to be the opposite."

"Normally people lose weight when they get off birth control," she continued, "So I decided to get off of it right at the beginning of the season and I gained weight like in less than a week, literally 15 pounds of water weight. And then it was like a big deal, like 'Cheryl's too fat for TV' and then I had a couple of my coworkers blasting my ass too and then I would wake up to like KTLA 'Cheryl's too fat.' I was like, this is crazy."

However, Burke told Hayes and Dr. Wali that the negative thoughts about her body were something she struggled with long before she became a famous dancer. She said, "I am a dancer, right, so at the end of the day, I've only known my coach to do weigh-ins with me. It was always a thing."

As the interview concluded, Burke said that she is sure that "it will help when I'm done with Dancing With the Stars," and is free from always being in tiny outfits in the public eye. She also said she is "doing the work" to establish a better relationship with her body but knows that the intrusive thoughts will never fully disappear.

She said, "I do believe that it will always be a problem. Maybe this is why I haven't frozen my eggs, maybe this is why it's hard for me to even say that I'm ready for a kid is because the last thing I'd want is to blame my kid for the way I look at myself. That is just not ideal. You have to heal first before we do that."