If you’ve seen a photo of Shonda Rhimes recently, you know that the TV mega-producer looks very different than she did a couple years ago. The creator of “Scandal” and “Grey’s Anatomy” has lost 100 pounds over the past year.

Rhimes appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Monday to discuss her new memoir, Year of Yes. During their talk, DeGeneres asked Rhimes about her transformation. Rhimes said that the guiding motivation behind her weight loss was health — not aesthetics.

“It was about the fact that I have a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old and a 13-year-old, and I realized that I wanted to be around for them, like be healthy,” she explained.

Rhimes also discussed the exact moment she knew her weight was a problem she needed to address. The TV producer boarded an airplane bound for New York and discovered that she couldn’t buckle her seatbelt. At first, she hoped there was something wrong with the seatbelt.

“It wasn’t the seatbelt. It was me,” Rhimes recalled. “And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I could get a seatbelt extender.’ I could ask the airline attendant to get me a seatbelt extender. Or I could die and not have a seatbelt extender — maybe the plane will crash, or I’ll fly out of the seat when we take off. And I decided that I would risk it, and just fly out of my seat, because I wasn’t going to say anything.”

More details about Rhimes’ weight loss — and Rhimes’ experiment with saying “yes” to things that scared her — can be found in Year of Yes, which will be released Nov. 10.

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