Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga performed at Super Bowl LI at NRG Stadium Feb. 5, 2017. She was criticized by some for her supposed "belly roll." Reuters/Dan Powers-USA Today Sports

Pop star Lady Gaga arguably performed one of the best Super Bowl halftime shows Sunday, but some people wanted to criticize her “belly roll” instead of her act. While Gaga sang and danced, her body was shamed by Twitter trolls.

Gaga did not respond to the naysayers. Though she did have a thin layer of flesh on her stomach, many people came to her defense, too.

Before the show took place, Gaga thanked her fans, affectionately known as “Little Monsters.”

“I want to say thank you to my fans for cheering me on all these years. There will not be any guest performers tonight, I'm doing these 13 minutes solo! I dedicate every second to the love, diversity, compassion, and wild spirit of our fan base,” she wrote in a Sunday Instagram post. “To that kid who felt unwanted, or the grown up who remembers how hard it was to find acceptance. This is for you. It is also for those whose hearts and minds have opened to our message. Thank you for believing in us so we could be here today little monsters this is YOUR stage. And I'm gonna leave my heart on it so you never forget it. Let's do this. Xoxo Love, Gaga p.s I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.” The post was liked more than 950,000 times by her 21.6 million followers.

It’s not the first time Gaga came under fire for her weight. When she looked thicker than normal in 2014, she told fans she was, “curvy and proud.”

Two years before that, she opened up about being bulimic as a teenager and wanted to be “skinny.”

“I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I’m not that confident,” she said during an interview with Maria Shriver. “I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.” She added: “I used to come home and say, ‘Dad, why do you always give us this food? I need to be thin.’ And he'd say, ‘Eat your spaghetti.’”

She was able to conquer her eating disorder because it affected her singing. “It made my voice bad, so I had to stop. The acid on your vocal chords, it's very bad,” she said. “But for those of you who don't sing, you maybe don't have that excuse until it's too late. It's very dangerous.”

Follow me on Twitter @mariamzzarella