For Mindy Kaling, having her weight loss be discussed on the internet is something she can understand.
“It’s sometimes no fun when one of your favorite actors loses weight. You have an idea of what they were like when you grew attached to them, and it made them endear themselves to you,” Kaling, 46, told Bustle in a profile published on Tuesday, May 19. “Of course, it’s never a joy to be scrutinized, but also I truly understand it, as someone who consumes pop culture.”
Kaling, who has three children, shared that her decision to lose weight stemmed from her realization that she needs to “live at least 20 more years” for her family. (The Mindy Project actress is mom to Katherine “Kit,” 8, Spencer, 5, and Anne, 2. She has never publicly disclosed the identity of the father of her children.)
“Do I wake up every day being like, ‘I look amazing and I’m so gorgeous’? No, unsurprisingly, but I truly feel so healthy,” she said.
While Kaling noted that she is considering shedding light on her weight loss via writing in the future, she’s currently open to discussing the motivation behind her health journey.
“When I was younger, I would want to lose weight because of vanity reasons,” she explained. “Now I want to lose weight or have lost weight because I want to stave off things like diabetes. I had it on both sides of my family, and trying to avoid those kinds of things will, I think, help longevity for me, and that’s my goal.”
Kaling has been candid about her body image issues through the years. In her 2011 memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Kaling detailed creating a “makeshift diet formula” in high school after a classmate told her she would “be really pretty if you lost weight.” Kaling shared that she “would eat exactly half of what was put in front of me, and no dessert.”
Kaling noted that she “stayed at a pretty normal weight until college” when she gained 35 pounds during the first six months of her freshman year. After exercising, Kaling dropped the weight but announced she would be “chubby for life” because she had “no hobbies except dieting,” had “no discipline,” men she’s “dated have been into me the way I am” and she was “pretty happy with the way I look, so long as I don’t break a beach chair.”
Years later, Kaling shared that pregnancy had shifted her mindset. “I feel like in conversations about fitness and exercise, if you’re going to be talking about someone who’s healthy and fit, you have to be a hard body with, like, a six-pack,” she told Shape in 2021. “But that’s not really how it works, and I have learned to embrace [my body] in the past six months [since having a baby].”
