Rachael Ray has sparked concern among her fans after some claimed she looked "unrecognizable" in a new video she shared on social media.
The celebrity chef, 57, posted a clip on Instagram demonstrating her approach to seasoning food, but it was her appearance that had her followers asking, "Is she okay?"
Rachael's cooking advice was overshadowed by many in the comment section claiming that she looked noticeably different.
"Holy crap I didn't recognize who it was until I read the name," one follower wrote. A second said: "I haven't seen her in so long. I'm genuinely wondering... is she okay?"
A third penned: "Did something happen to her?" A fourth added: "What is going on here, wellness check."
However, many others came to Rachael's defense, with one person responding to the critics: "Y'all do know folks age and go through challenges in their bodies. Let's grow up."
© InstagramAnother said: "A swift google search would let y'all know that she has been going thru some very stressful events and taken a couple serious falls. Be kind."
The TV personality kept a relatively low profile in 2025 after enduring a tough five years, due to a health issue, several tragedies involving her properties, and her mother's death.
Rachael revealed on her podcast, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, that she'd suffered "a couple of bad falls" in 2024 while carrying firewood outside her home in New York, yet appeared to recover quickly from the ordeal.
The star, who is married to entertainment lawyer and musician John M. Cusimano, watched her home in Lake Luzerne, New York, burn down in 2020 after a fire broke out in the roof.
"We lost a huge part of the physical evidence that we exist, all of the things we had created – paintings and pictures and music, plus everything we were gifted over the years or collected together as a couple; paintings that were made for us and letters that were written to us," she told The Hollywood Reporter.
© Getty ImagesOnly a year later, their New York City apartment flooded after Hurricane Ida swept through, leaving tens of thousands of dollars' worth of damage behind.
"We had finally just finished the work on making the apartment over. And then, Ida took it out. And I mean, out. Down hard," she explained to People.
"Like, literally every speaker in the ceiling, the fireplace, every seam in the wall...It was like the apartment just literally melted, like in Wicked or something."
© Getty ImagesWhen a team came to help rebuild the home and make it safe to live in, another disaster occurred.
"[The remediation team] comes in. They put up their fans and their humidifiers. And then, they make a hole in the wall and break the main water pipe and flood the entire building down to the first floor, from our apartment on the sixth floor," she recalled.
© Getty Images"The people that we were waiting for, the cavalry, burst this pipe and made everything worse.
"Tell me you would not feel like a kicked can," she said, before adding: "There are so much worse positions we could be in. I mean, I'm alive. And I do have a roof over my head. And I do have a job."
