John Lennon and Yoko Ono were ‘obsessed with staying thin’, close friend claims

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were “obsessed” with their weight during their time in the spotlight.

Former Los Angeles radio and TV announcer Elliot Mintz, who was a close friend of Lennon and Ono, claimed in his memoir how they were “obsessed with staying thin”. “We All Shine On: John Yoko and Me,” Out on Tuesday.

Mintz, 79, became friends with the pair after interviewing Ono, now 91, for her 1971 album “Fly.” Since John’s death in 1980, he remained close to the Japanese singer as well as her son, Sean Lennon.

“John kept a journal in which he wrote down every day how much he weighed,” Mintz alleges in his book about the late Beatles member. People,

“Yoko and John had countless questions on this topic,” Mintz said.

The media consultant said that Lennon once called him at 4 in the morning asking for help finding “diet pills”.

“He thought everyone in Hollywood was skinny and trim and had magic diet pills, and he insisted I get that for him,” Mintz recalled, adding that he met the couple. Didn’t do that favor for him.

Mintz described Lennon and Ono’s clothing rack as “like a Manhattan boutique” and said it was arranged “according to waist size” with a large wraparound ladder so they could reach the higher boxes.

Lennon and Ono had “hundreds of clothes, including dozens of hats and glasses,” Mintz said.

They put their various jeans and pantsuits, whatever they were, in different ranges of waist sizes, from 28 (inches) to 32 or so, depending on how they perceived their weight and “How tight the pants fit,” he said in his statement. Book.

In Mintz’s words to People, the couple’s refrigerator was reportedly filled with “unrecognizable” health foods.

“His refrigerator was like going into this pit of curiosities,” he told the outlet. “Sometimes these would be paper containers with what appeared to be leftovers from the previous night, and you would open the container and look and still not recognize what they were eating.”

Mintz added, “Before John learned to cook, he was a little weak in the nutrition department.” “And Yoko, with all due respect, didn’t know her way around a stove.”

The Post has reached out to Ono’s rep for comment.

The “Give Peace a Chance” star was widowed when Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman outside his apartment in New York City on December 8, 1980. He was 40 years old.

The couple’s son, Shawn, was only 5 years old at the time of the tragedy. Shawn is now 49 years old.

In recent years, Ono has remained out of the limelight amid rumors of her declining health. In 2020, a source close to her staff told The Post that the avant-garde artist required around-the-clock care and rarely left her spacious apartment at the Dakota, located on NYC’s Upper West Side.

Mintz, who has served as Ono’s family spokesperson, told People that her new memoir contains no “salacious” material about Ono and Lennon.

He said, “To the best of my knowledge it is an honest first-person account of what it was like to spend nearly a decade of my life with her and now, more than 50 years with Yoko.”