Roughly a year after starting a weight loss drug, tennis champion Serena Williams says the medication has made her the healthiest she has ever been.
Williams, 44, announced her exit from professional tennis in 2022 after a 27-year career, 23 Grand Slams and four Olympic gold medals. Even during the peak of that career, she told NBC News, she struggled to lose weight from diet and exercise. Williams also worried about the risk of diabetes, which runs in her family and is diagnosed at higher rates among Black people compared with the general population.
“Sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how many steps you take, how many miles you run, you just can’t get over that hump. I know that for a fact,” Williams said. “As a woman, as I age, I definitely couldn’t get over that hump.”
Williams revealed in August that she had started taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist, a widely popular class of drugs. At the same time, she announced a partnership with the company Ro, which prescribes GLP-1 medications through telehealth. Williams’ husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is an investor in Ro and serves on its board.
GLP-1 drugs suppress appetite by mimicking a hormone in the gut. The class includes Ozempic and Mounjaro, which can lower blood sugar levels in people with diabetes, as well as Zepbound and Wegovy, which are approved for weight management. Wegovy has also been approved to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who are overweight or obese.
Williams, who shared her health metrics on Wednesday as part of a campaign with Ro, said GLP-1 medication has lowered her cholesterol and steadied her blood sugar. She lost roughly 34 pounds in the last year, she said.
It’s not clear whether that result is typical. Representatives declined to share Williams’ weight, and clinical trials focused on people who were overweight or had obesity, with an average starting weight of 232 pounds. Those trials found that adults who took Wegovy or Zepbound shed roughly 15% of their body weight — 35 pounds, on average.
Stopping these weight loss medications can lead some people to regain weight — an average of around 10 pounds in the first year after discontinuing the drug.
Williams said that for her, GLP-1 medications are “a lifetime thing.”
She said that since 2021 — her penultimate year of professional tennis — her total cholesterol has dropped 30%, from 185 milligrams per deciliter to 129 milligrams per deciliter. (Doctors say around 150 milligrams per deciliter is ideal.)
“Some of these numbers are from when I was literally winning Grand Slams. So it wasn’t like I was just playing tennis. I was dominating,” Williams said.
Her cholesterol change is unusual, however: People taking a GLP-1 medication, on average, see around a 5% decrease in their total cholesterol levels.
Lowering cholesterol can reduce one’s lifetime heart disease risk. Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S., driven in part by increases in obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure among adults. Black adults are 54% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than white adults, according to a 2023 study.
“I was at risk for heart disease, and I didn’t even know that,” Williams said. “That’s kind of scary, and that’s the No. 1 thing that kills Americans. So I could have been a statistic.”
Losing weight also reduced stress on her knee joints, which was one of her reasons for starting a GLP-1 medication, Williams said. Knee injuries plagued her throughout her career, and Williams said in August that she may have won more matches without them.
When asked on “TODAY” whether she plans to return to tennis, Williams said it was “not a yes or a no” and that she would “see what happens.”