Grey’s Anatomy star Shonda Rhimes recently opened up about her past health struggles, revealing that she thought she’d be dead in ten years time at a certain point in her life.
Per PEOPLE, Rhimes, who is a mother of three children, touched on the topic while speaking at the Shonda Rhimes in Conversation with Robin Roberts: Year of Yes at 92NY on October 14. The 55-year-old said her children inspired her to have a lifestyle change.
“I love the story that you tell when your daughter, you put her on your shoulders and you were able to run around with her and up the steps and there’s a time that you couldn’t do that. And how you literally cried after,” Robin Roberts told Rhimes about her health journey in the expanded edition of her book Year of Yes.
“I did. I have little kids, guys and I really thought like I might be dead in 10 years,” Rhimes responded. “Like that’s how bad I felt. And I couldn’t, I couldn’t put my 20 pound kid on my shoulders and run around, which I should have been able to do.”
She added: “And so when that moment happened, when I could do that, it was such a moment of both relief and revelation for me that it’s one of those memories I’ll take with me forever.”
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“Like that moment her joy and me sort of having done it and feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I feel myself again,’ ” she said.
Rhimes also touched on how her relationship with food was not healthy, saying that her “mantra was my body is just a container for my brain.”
“At a certain point I started to feel like truly feel terrible. Like have a hard time going up the stairs, getting breathless all the time,” she said. “Feeling like I had, like, I had sleep apnea, I developed sleep apnea and I like woke up all the time, choking in, in my sleep. Like I started to feel awful and I was like, I have to do something about this.”
“I’d been saying like a happy yes to being out of shape and uncomfortable because food, food works guys,” she continued. “You can put fried chicken on your sadness, you can put cheesecake on your heartbreak.”
