Adele has spoken out about her highly publicized weight loss in a candid interview with Oprah Winfrey.
The interview aired on Sunday night as part of a two-hour special, Adele: One Night Only, on CBS. During the show, the British singer opened up about divorce, reconciling with her late father, and single-parenthood, all ahead of her fourth studio album's release later this week.
Adele, 33, has shocked fans over the last two years with her dramatic physical transformation. The star told Winfrey she lost nearly 100 pounds after embarking on a new exercise regime and explained that going to the gym every day was a way of controlling anxiety amid her divorce from entrepreneur Simon Konecki.
"I had the most terrifying anxiety attacks after I left my marriage," she said. "They paralyzed me completely and made me so confused because I wouldn't be able to have any control over my body.
"[Working out] really contributed towards me getting my mind right," she added.
While she has a newfound love for the gym, the singer said that her diet is not restrictive and she still eats junk food every now and then. As for the criticism she faced over her weight loss, Adele said she wasn't "shocked or even fazed by it".
"My body has been objectified my entire career. I'm either too big or too small; I'm either hot or I'm not," the singer said. "I was body positive then and I'm body positive now. It's not my job to validate how people feel about their bodies [...] I'm trying to sort my own life out. I can't add another worry."
Alongside clips of the sit-down in Winfrey's California rose garden - the same one where the talk-show host interviewed Prince Harry and Meghan Markle earlier this year - the special showed Adele performing a selection of new songs and classic hits in a one-off concert at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory.
The show marked her first live performance in over four years and was watched by a star-studded audience including Drake, Lizzo, Selena Gomez, and Seth Rogan.
As well as opening up about her weight loss, the star also spoke to Winfrey about her divorce from Simon Konecki in 2018. She described the moment she realized her marriage was crumbling when taking a personality test in a glossy magazine, and blurting out: "I'm really not happy. I'm not living, I'm just plodding along."
She recalled: "From there, I was like 'What am I doing? What am I doing it for?'"
Adele and Konecki - who were together for eight years - still live opposite each other in LA, and continue to co-parent their eight-year-old son Angelo. The singer stressed that though she is no longer "in love" with her ex she still cares deeply for him, and credits him with "saving her life" by providing her with much-needed stability when she first became famous.
She also told Winfrey that she felt embarrassed by the failure of her marriage, saying: "I take marriage very seriously."
"I've been obsessed with a nuclear family my whole life because I never came from one," the singer explained. "From a very young age [I] promised myself that, when I had kids, we'd stay together"
Adele's father, Mark Evans, left home when she was just two years old. Towards the end of the interview, she confessed how "the absolute lack of presence and effort" from him was the "biggest wound" she'd suffered as a child.
"I had absolutely zero expectations of anybody because I learned not to have them through my dad," she said. "He was the reason I haven't fully accessed what it is to be in a loving, loving relationship with somebody."
Evans' alcoholism made it almost impossible for Adele to have a relationship with him growing up. When she was young, he admitted to drinking as much as two liters of vodka and eight pints a day, Mail Online reports.
But Adele did manage to reconcile with him before he passed away in May after a six-year struggle with bowel cancer. After meeting with him in Wales, she managed to play him all of her new album over Zoom.
"It was amazing for me and him," she said. "I think he could listen to me sing it, but not saying it.
"So it was very, very healing [and] when he died, it was literally like the wound closed up."
Adele's fourth studio album, 30, is set for release this Friday 19 November 2021.