Jorja Smith was sitting across from a journalist at a pub that had unintentionally turned into a wake on a hot July afternoon in southwest London. She was drinking an alcohol-free sparkling wine that she obviously found disappointing, and she was laughing between glances around the room. She appeared to be in good health.
Excellent—loose, humorous, and in the moment. She was back on the road, her third album was about to be released, and the music she’d created with London producer P2J was genuinely exciting—a complete shift into UK garage and Afrobeats that felt more like someone finally putting on a record they’d always wanted to make than a calculated reinvention. Nevertheless, she uninvitedly brought up the other story during that afternoon’s conversation. The one concerning her physique.
The term “Jorja Smith weight gain” trended on X for two days in a row in June 2023. It’s worth pausing to consider that detail. Not in hours. Days. The internet decided that the most important topic of discussion was her waist size.
She is one of the most talented vocalists to come out of Britain in ten years, a double Brit winner, a Mercury Prize nominee, and the Walsall teenager who uploaded Blue Lights to SoundCloud at the age of eighteen and somehow ended up on a Drake playlist that millions of people heard. It started with a video of her performing a remix of Little Things with Nia Archives, which garnered hundreds of comments regarding her appearance before going viral on Twitter and, presumably, lasting there until it became boring.
Smith has discussed this directly in interviews with The Guardian and The Sunday Times, and the candor in those exchanges is remarkable because it lacks resilience. She doesn’t put it in a tidy message about moving on and loving oneself. “I have put on some weight,” she said to The Sunday Times, “but what people don’t know is that I’ve struggled with my weight since I was a kid in school.” “I’m not 18 anymore,” she continued, her plainness striking a deeper blow than any dramatic declaration could. My stomach is not flat because I did not have plastic surgery.
She claimed that she had been feeling better than ever during that time, eating healthily for the first time after years of skipping meals and compulsive running, and that the criticism had come right after she had begun taking care of herself. “It was a proper headfuck,” she replied, “because I was thinking: Wait… can I do anything right?”
The setting in which this story takes place elevates it above a celebrity versus trolls story. When Smith rose to fame, she was a very young woman, and Blue Lights attracted more than just musical attention. She experienced early sexualization, frequent objectification, and years of awareness that discussions about her appearance were occurring concurrently with, and occasionally more loudly than, discussions about her actual work.
In 2023, weight commentary wasn’t so much a novel phenomenon as it was a well-known one that peaked. The fact that it came at a time of genuine creative momentum, just as she was preparing to release Falling or Flying, may have contributed to its profound impact, making the public’s fixation with her body seem even more out of place.
Practically speaking, her reaction was to retreat. She gave her team control over Instagram and ceased managing her own social media accounts. She completely abandoned X. She left London and returned to her hometown of Walsall in the West Midlands, saying it was time to “touch some grass, see some trees.” This decision shocked those in the industry.
She claimed that London’s career anxiety had become too much to handle. Distance was beneficial. Eventually, she returned to the city, but on her own terms and without the “permanent sense” of needing to wear armor, as she described it.
The fact that the backlash targeted a woman at the precise moment her body was undergoing an entirely normal change as she transitioned through her mid-twenties is hard to ignore. Research consistently demonstrates that women gain weight during this decade due to life’s accumulation—jobs, stress, relationships, and the body simply maturing past adolescence—rather than failure or neglect. The fact that Smith had to publicly explain this and present her own biology as something that needed to be defended says more about the society that required the explanation than it does about Smith.
She seemed to have moved past the body-shaming chapter as she talked about the new album, as evidenced by the way her eyes widened when she described the nine songs that were written in two studio days and the obvious joy she felt at finally creating music that people could dance to. She acknowledged that she still has her days.
Even so, she occasionally stops herself after reading a comment and thinking, “Maybe they’re right.” However, she is touring and recording records once more, and What Are the Odds sounds like someone who has found their footing. Whatever the internet chooses to say about it.
