Meghan Trainor is humming right along.
In the past year, the dynamic singer-songwriter has won a Billboard Hitmaker of the Year award, welcomed a new baby to her family, and recorded her seventh studio album, Toy with Me, due out April 24.
But Trainor’s dance card has always been full. Since adolescence, she’s been busy writing and performing retro-inflected chart toppers like “All About That Bass,” “Lips Are Movin,” and “Made You Look.” In the process, she’s blazed a trail of empowerment and self-realization for female fans across the world. Winning a Grammy at 21 was just the beginning.
Trainor says her meteoric early success felt like a rocket ship taking off: “I was just trying to hang on.”
Ten years, seven albums, and three kids later, her relationship to the music industry and her own career has changed. “Now, I’m working my hardest, knowing the business better,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Let’s go! Everyone, come on!’”
Anthems for Her Daughter
Trainor wrote Toy with Me with a particular listener in mind: her daughter, Mikey, who was born in January.
“I love being a woman, even though it feels impossible a lot of days,” Trainor says. To validate and empower her little girl — and countless other daughters, sisters, and mothers — she set out to fill Toy with Me with songs that share this message: Life as a woman can be tough, but so are you.
“I didn’t end up writing sad ballads,” she explains. “I ended up writing anthems.”
“Still Don’t Care” is one such anthem, which takes a direct hit at a culture that stands ever-ready to criticize women for their personal choices, no matter what they are.
“Said I was too thick, then I got way too thin,” Trainor sings. “And I try to stand out, but I want to fit in.” The song’s infectious hook sets up the question. “Let me take a moment, think it over, does it touch me at all?” to which Trainor’s answer is resounding: “Nope! I still don’t care.”
Trainor’s trademark confidence blooms in “Shimmer,” an upbeat dance song that Trainor wrote for her mother, with whom she shares a close bond. The unapologetic self-love that made the body-positive anthem “All About That Bass” a breakout hit in 2014 (“Every inch of you is perfect, from the bottom to the top”) is echoed in “Shimmer,” with a chorus that declares: “You can love who you are tonight.”
Trainor recalls shooting the music video for “Shimmer”: “I was dancing my heart out and I thought, ‘Today’s a good day to be a woman.’ I can’t wait for my daughter to watch it one day.”
“They Want to Meet Me?”
Trainor is known globally for her voice, but her initial success stemmed from her songwriting. “All About That Bass” was being pitched to other vocal artists when an industry executive, who saw potential not only for the song but for 19-year-old Trainor, suggested she sing it. This was a dream come true — and entirely unexpected.
“I was so insecure back then that I never thought it would be possible,” Trainor says. “I was like, ‘Wait, they want to meet me?’”
The dizzying success of “All About That Bass,” which spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, changed Trainor’s life dramatically. “I had to switch gears really fast,” she says. “I’d never gotten professional makeup done or danced in front of humans and then, overnight, I had a music video.”
The rocket ride of early fame was thrilling, Trainor says, but intense. When she remembers herself as that young artist, she recalls not the glitz and glamour, but frequent bouts with bronchitis and other health challenges. “That sweet girl went through a lot,” Trainor says. “She got sick so much and just lived off of antibiotics. She was very alone and very scared a lot of the time.”
Safeguarding her health was critical, but Trainor says it took a long time to figure out where to start: “I didn’t learn how to take care of my health until I was pregnant with my first child at 26.”
Health, a Science Project
When the world shut down in 2020, Trainor and husband, actor Daryl Sabara, glimpsed a rare opportunity.
“I’ve never had a pause in my job,” Trainor says. “I was like, ‘This must be a sign. Let’s be crazy and have a baby.’”
When Trainor was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, she was bewildered — and immediately enrolled in a crash course in physiology, biology, psychology and nutrition, among other lessons.
“It was the first time I had to really focus on what went in my body and learn how my body was affected,” she explains, saying that the process felt like a high-stakes science project.
The experience was a wake-up call for Trainor. She started working with a trainer and a dietitian, who offered this game-changing analogy: “Your body is a machine. You have to figure out what oils it well.”
After much trial and error, Trainor figured out the formula. For one, her body needed cooked, not raw, vegetables. And it responded well to walking and strength training but not to jogging.
The birth of Trainor’s son, Riley, turbo-charged her motivation to stay healthy. “I would be inspired every day by looking at him,” she says. “I’d be like, ‘Let’s go walk so I can live forever to be with you forever.’ That's been my motivation ever since.”
Her efforts paid off; when she became pregnant again, she did not develop gestational diabetes. After her son Barry’s birth, she returned to the exercise and nutrition regimen that had worked so well before. She took on the 75 Hard Challenge and consistently ate healthy, but the weight she’d gained during her pregnancy would not budge. Trainor was exhausted, ridden with inflammation, and working herself too hard, her doctors warned.
At the time, Trainor’s friends began reporting positive results with the GLP-1 medications they were taking for various health reasons. After her doctor assured her of the medications’ safety, she tried one at the lowest dose.
Trainor says the medication was a valuable addition to the health toolkit she’d been building for five years, an addition that amplified the power of the exercise and healthy eating strategies already in place. The GLP-1’s reduction of food noise also allowed her to successfully eliminate gluten and dairy from her diet, which improved her chronic inflammation.
“It was the greatest thing,” she says of augmenting her healthy routines with a GLP-1 medication. “For the first time ever, my body scans showed that my levels were all in the green.”
Unlike the rocket ride of professional success, which took off when Trainor was still just a teen, the launch of her health journey happened later and has been a defining experience of her adulthood. “Trying to figure out the right exercise and food for my body has been one of the biggest challenges of my life,” Trainor says. But, she adds, it’s been well worth the effort: “Our bodies thank us and we thank our bodies and we’ve never felt better.”
