- Adele revealed that she’s lived with chronic back pain, including injuries like two separate slipped discs, for half of her life.
- “I was in bed and I sneezed and my fifth one flew out,” the 33-year-old said this week of her first slipped disc, which she got at 15.
- The singer’s fitness journey has strengthened her back and core, alleviating some of her symptoms: “I can run around with my kid a little bit more.”
Adele’s new exercise routine hasn’t just resulted in better mental health and a 100-pound weight loss; it’s resulted in some unexpected physical benefits, too. In a new interview with The Face, the 33-year-old singer revealed the massive toll that back pain has taken on her life—and how she’s just now beginning to overcome it.
“I’ve been in pain with my back for, like, half of my life, really,” Adele said. “It flares up, normally due to stress or from a stupid bit of posture.”
“I slipped my first disc when I was 15 from sneezing. I was in bed and I sneezed and my fifth one flew out,” she recalled. “In January, I slipped my sixth one, my L6. And then where I had a C-section, my core was useless.”
A slipped disc is when a soft cushion of tissue between the bones in your spine pushes out, according to the National Health Service. It can be quite painful—especially if it presses on nerves. It usually gets better slowly with rest, gentle exercise, and painkillers.
After deciding to divorce her husband a few years ago, Adele threw herself into the gym, really getting into exercise: “It was never about losing weight. I thought, If I can make my body physically strong, and I can feel that and see that, then maybe one day I can make my emotions and my mind physically strong,” Adele told Vogue last month.
The “Easy on Me” singer started with her lower back and stomach, since “I had just nothing going on down there,” she said to Vogue. Eventually, she accomplished her goals by working out, fortifying her mental health, and alleviating her back pain.
“I’m more agile because I can now move more, because of my back. I got my core strong,” Adele continued to The Face. “Where I got my tummy strong, down at the bottom, which I never had before, my back don’t play up as much. It means I can do more. I can run around with my kid a little bit more.”
She says that her accompanying weight loss was exciting—“I had to buy a whole new wardrobe, which was fun,” she revealed—but the musician stressed that she’s still the same person as she was before she lost the weight. “I still have things about my body that I don’t like. They’re not insecurities,” Adele revealed.
“On the cover of Vogue, they were all trying to put me in sleeveless dresses. I was like, ‘I ain’t showing my arms! Are you mad?’” she recalled. “I’ve never liked my arms, ever, and I still don’t like my arms. It goes back to that thing of being thin and being happy. Yeah, my arms are half the size, don’t mean I f**king like them! F**king hate my feet still.”
But above all else, Adele is happy about her new outlook. “I like feeling strong, I really do. I love it,” she said. “I was lifting weights this morning, and I’ve gone up from what I was doing a couple of weeks ago. When I feel that I have the weight of the world—of my world at least—on my shoulders, I can handle it a bit more because I’ve gone up 10 pounds with my weights.”
Jake Smith, an editorial fellow at Prevention, recently graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in magazine journalism and just started going to the gym. Let's be honest—he's probably scrolling through Twitter right now.
