James Corden Reveals Weight Loss, Reflects On Why His Diets Never Worked In The Past

Actor and talk show host James Corden has been making people laugh for many years through his various roles on the small and big screen, and, of course, during his time as the host of The Late Late Show on CBS. While Corden's probably best known for making "Carpool Karaoke" a part of the pop culture landscape, the affable, musically-inclined entertainer is now opening up about some personal struggles with weight. Corden spoke recently to Oprah about losing weight during quarantine, and reflected on why diets never worked for him in the past.

Of course, many people have trouble with things like maintaining what they feel is a healthy weight, staying active enough and eating a balanced diet, so it's not really a surprise that James Corden has dealt with some of those issues as well. Being in the public eye can even exacerbate such feelings for many celebrities, seeing as how a lot of fans expect certain actors, models, musicians and other famous folk to look a certain way. Now, though, Corden has revealed that he's lost weight in a chat with Oprah recently, and told her:

I’ve lost 16 pounds, and I’ve been doing some exercise, which I hate.

Well, as I mentioned, and as you probably know anyway, few people on this planet haven't had at least some experience with wanting (or even truly needing) to lose weight. And, I'm sure just about as many folks, if not more, also share James Corden's thoughts on exercise. I'll never understand how mentally taxing work doesn't actually manage to burn calories, considering how worn out one can feel from reading a scholarly tome or trying to help a child understand long division, but, I digress.

Corden was asked about his weight loss journey because of a video he posted not long ago, which detailed how he'd spent roughly the past 15 years promising himself that he'd start a diet and lose some pounds at the beginning of every year, but none of those plans ever worked out in the long term. Corden continued, talking about his decision to open up, noting:

I have to say, I started on January 2, I found this past five or so weeks incredibly transformative for me. A part of me feels like I wanted to put that video out there maybe to self consciously make me really do it. I found it a lot easier than I thought and a lot of that is genuinely down to … as soon as you open yourself out to people and say, ‘This is how I’m feeling and I might be struggling with this,’ you will be met with a wave of, ‘How can I help?’ Whereas if I hold onto those things and I’m eating stuff out of the fridge at midnight and then feeling rubbish about it, you’re never going to get that support… I’m on the start of a journey that I’m determined to finish and feel I can.

Opening up about personal struggles can be hard, especially because many people feel that we're supposed to hide the things that we feel make us weak or less than in some way. But, it sounds like James Corden has found the courage to really tackle why he hasn't been able to implement a healthier lifestyle, and he certainly got a lot of needed support from Oprah's virtual audience after speaking out. Hopefully, he'll be able to keep going and feel a lot better because of the changes he's making.

You can still watch James Corden weeknights on The Late Late Show, which airs at 12:37 a.m. EST on CBS.

Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism.