Sam Smith Talks ‘Nightmare’ of Getting Liposuction at 13: ‘I Was Just Getting So Teased’

Adolescence can be a trying, sometimes terrifying time for many teens. But on Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast this week, Sam Smith revisited a particularly challenging time they went through as a young teenager struggling with painful physical changes.

“I had surgery on my chest when I was 13 years old, because I had a growing chest,” Smith told Badgley about the procedure they first talked about in a 2019 interview. “There were all sorts of reasons why, but mainly, I was just getting so teased, I couldn’t go swimming in school, and I couldn’t — like, getting changed in the locker room was hell. So I got liposuction when I was 13 years old.”

As a non-binary, queer child trying to find their way in the world, Smith praised their parents for being “hugely supportive of the whole thing, because they just saw how much it was crippling everything about me.” Describing the “brutal” years in a Catholic school at 12 while being “so obviously gay,” Smith said they were popular, “really chubby, round a pink” and totally comfortable with their queerness after coming out to a female friend at 10.

But their weight was always a burden. “My queerness was something that I could handle and could have a grasp on it, but my weight as a kid was the hardest thing for me in school and weirdly the thing I got teased most about,” Smith said.

The singer recalled that it was “just all a struggle with food and stuff. And the liposuction, it worked, but it was also a nightmare because they gave me a bandage,” describing a kind of bra that they were originally meant to wear for a month while healing that turned into a year of binding. “If I wore the bandage, it meant that I would get to the front of the lunch queue,” Smith laughed. “So I just kept this bandage on for nearly a year, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, don’t come close to me,’ and then I’d just get first at lunch and I’d eat more and eat more and eat more… so the surgery never really worked because I just love food.”

Smith has long been open about their history of struggle with body issues, including in a 2019 post in which the singer posed shirtless on a beach and described a reluctance early in their career to take photos without a shirt on. “In the past if I have ever done a photo shoot with so much as a t-shirt on, I have starved myself for weeks in advance and then picked and prodded at every picture and then normally taken the picture down,” Smith said at the time, adding that the near-unanimous support from fans has helped them be open about their struggle.

Smith is gearing up to kick off a 12-show To Be Free residency at the Warsaw in New York City on Nov. 26 before moving on to a 20-night residency at the refurbished Castro Theatre in San Francisco.

Click here to listen to the Podcrushed Smith interview (liposuction discussion begins at 26-minute mark).