Cher Revealed 2-Pound Weight Gain at Age 28 When ‘Miserable’ in New Memoir

Cher

Cher did not hold back when sharing details about her personal life in her newly released book Cher: The Memoir — Part One.

The 78-year-old singer offered specifics about her weight, and its slight fluctuation, more than once throughout the course of the book. In one passage, Cher details her decision to kick off the first 1975 episode of CBS’s Cher with an honest conversation with the audience.

“My palms sweaty, I stood in the spotlight and began my monologue by saying that people may have noticed I’d been gone for a little while, but I was so thrilled to be back,” she recalled in the book.

Cher told the crowd: “I am twenty-eight years old, five feet seven and a half inches tall, have black hair and brown eyes, weigh a hundred and four pounds when I’m happy, and a hundred and eight when I’m miserable. I’m a hundred and six now, and my fate is in your hands.”

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Her solo show came almost a year after The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour came to an end in March 1974. Following Cher’s split from Sonny Bono, she begged CBS not to renew the program — so the broadcasting company didn’t.

“People were very disappointed,” she recalled of the show’s ending, referring to the tumultuous relationship she had with Bono prior to their divorce. “Those who blamed me didn’t really know what it was like to be in my situation or how hard it had been.”

Sonny Bono and Cher seen on their show ‘The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.’

Cher was married to Bono from 1969 to 1975. (The former couple “told everyone we’d been legally wed” in October 1964, which wasn’t true.)

While they had the “perfect marriage” in the public eye, there were issues between Cher and Bono at home. At one point in the book, Cher recalled her longtime best friend Paulette Howell thinking that she had the “perfect marriage.” (Cher and Bono share son Chaz, who was born in March 1969. Bono died in 1998 at age 62 after a skiing accident.)

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“She had no idea of the tension building up inside me. In truth, I was finding it hard to eat and to sleep,” Cher wrote. “Weight was falling off me. For Paulette’s birthday she had chicken cordon bleu, which I love. I remember trying to get myself to eat it and I couldn’t take a bite. That scared me.”

Cher’s weight also came into play when she was detailing her experience working on various TV shows with Bono. At one point during the beginning of her TV fame, the singer revealed that she was a size six at 25 years old and only weighed 180 pounds.

“I was finally getting some definition, especially once we started to do dance routines for our production numbers,” she shared. “Also, my body type had finally come into vogue.”