Former 'Dance Moms' star Nia Sioux still deals with fans who comment on her weight and compare her b
- It's been five years since Nia Sioux was a cast member on the hit reality TV show "Dance Moms."
- Today, she has millions of social-media followers, but with them can come negative comments.
- Sioux said she frequently deals with fans discussing her weight and body.
Nia Sioux, who starred on the reality TV show "Dance Moms" from 2011 to 2017, said that over a decade after the show debuted she still gets comments from fans about her weight.
In a July interview with Insider, Sioux, who joined the cast of "Dance Moms" aged nine and has pivoted to become a social media influencer in more recent years, talked about receiving negative comments from fans of the show, who she said still see her as a child star.
"It's really hard for people to picture me as an adult because they've seen me on TV since I was nine years old, and people will comment crazy things online like 'you've gained weight,' and I'm like, well I sure hope I have because I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be the same weight I was when I was 12 years old," she said.
Sioux has a combined social media following of 15 million across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and said that when she posts photos of herself, she is used to receiving negative comments about her body, which she described as more "curvy" now than when she was on the show.
"People will comment, 'Oh my gosh, you're being so revealing to being inappropriate.' But I'm like, this is just how my body looks," she told Insider.
Sioux said she feels that viewers of the show who still follow her on social media often want her to act the same way she did when she was on the show, even though she was much younger then. "It's like they expect me not to grow up," she told Insider.
While she said that negative "comments do get to you at a certain point," she added that "often I just have to decide to not care because I don't even know who the person is."
In the years following her exit from "Dance Moms," Sioux has been garnering views on TikTok by taking part in viral dances and trends while also studying full time at UCLA. She told Insider that her goal is to "keep performing in any capacity" now that she is no longer on the show, and said she has now come to a point in life where she is "confident in her own skin."
@niasioux @sydneyserena ♬ Major Bag Alert - Damickey Lillard"I'm not going to let a few comments tear me down, because I'm out here doing what I've always dreamed of doing," she said.
"Dance Moms" was a reality series that first aired on Lifetime in 2011. It followed the dance training of several child dancers from the Abby Lee Miller dance studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and quickly became a hit show. The series became mired in controversy in 2017 when the show's main dance coach, Abby Lee Miller, was sentenced to a year in jail for bankruptcy fraud. The last episode of "Dance Moms" aired in 2019.
For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.
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