René Cormillot spoke openly about one of the most difficult periods of her life: the attacks and the taunts she endured for years because of her weight. In an interview with the streaming program Despertar Animal, Alberto Cormillot’s daughter recalled what it was like to live with 60 kilos more than she has now and also shared how she navigated that situation with her family.
“I suffered a lot of attacks because of my weight,” she began, recalling the questions she faced about her body. The peculiarity, as she explained, was that many of those criticisms were directly linked to being the daughter of one of the country’s most renowned nutrition specialists.
“How could the daughter of Cormillot be overweight?” they used to wonder. For Renée, that view stemmed from a mistaken idea about obesity: “It’s as if someone said Favaloro couldn’t have heart problems. Obesity is a disease; it’s hard to understand it.”
The comparison with René Favaloro arose to explain what, for her, was an absurd contradiction: being the daughter of a nutrition specialist did not make her immune to a disease.
The taunts and the advice she received about her body
Renée also remembered that, faced with overweight, many times the responses from those around her boiled down to simple comments or pieces of advice.
“Usually the cheap joke of cutting out desserts and hitting the gym,” she noted, referring to the phrases people who deal with weight issues often hear.
However, she insisted that she tried not to let those aggressions determine her life. “I don’t think they affected me too much,” she said.
In that sense, she explained that her father had a clear stance toward the attacks they received: “My father always had the policy of not responding.”
“It hurt to have a daughter going through a bad time”
During the interview, René also spoke about how Alberto Cormillot lived through that situation. When asked whether her father suffered more than she did from the criticisms, she clarified that the doctor’s pain was related to seeing her go through a difficult moment.
“No, he suffered having a daughter who was going through a hard time,” he explained.
Renée acknowledged that during that period she indeed had a hard time and that her daily life was heavily conditioned by her weight. “I was going through a bad time; I weighed 60 kilos more than I do now,” she recalled.
To explain just how much that weight affected her daily life, she even remembered the fear that thinking about an eventual injury generated.
“Imagine if I fractured this leg while weighing 140,” she posed. And she was adamant about how she felt at that moment: “You can’t move.”
“There’s no way, leave me in a bed. You have no life,” she added.
René Cormillot and her view on body acceptance
Toward the end of her reflection, René made a clarification that she considered important: for her, accepting bodies and respecting each person’s choices is not at odds with being able to tell her own story.
“I understand that we must accept all bodies, and we must accept what a person chooses,” she affirmed.
But she immediately drew a distinction from her own story: “The reality is that at least I can speak for myself.”
And she returned to focus on how she felt when she weighed 140 kilos: “I had no life.”
Her words thus reclaim a personal experience that, for years, was shaped by both overweight and the glances and the comments she received for being Alberto Cormillot’s daughter. A story she has now chosen to tell from her own perspective, foregrounding the impact those situations had on her daily life.
