Mindy Kaling will always remember her first introduction to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
“I don’t know why I remember this story, and I’m not proud of it,” Kaling, 47, began on the Tuesday, June 30, episode of Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast, noting she met the two comics while guest-writing an episode of Saturday Night Live in 2005. “I don’t know why I would possibly come up with two women that I admire … but we were somewhere and I was like, ‘Yeah, I just want to lose 30 pounds.’”
According to the Not Suitable for Work creator, Fey, 56, and Poehler, 54, “stopped” in their tracks and told her, “What? That is too much weight.’”
“I remember I was so happy for, like, three weeks after that,” Kaling recalled. “I was like, ‘Wow, Amy and Tina don’t think I’m a fat load.’ I was so happy, [like] even in the aughts, you guys were like, ‘What, are you crazy?’”
Kalling further acknowledged that her conversation with the SNL icons came at a time when diet programs, like Weight Watchers, were all the rage.
“We were, just like everybody else, were constantly trying to figure out everybody’s relationship to being on camera,” Poehler replied. “I do think that for better or for worse, what women do for each other and to each other is they talk about their bodies to each other.”
As for Kaling, she noted that Fey and Poehler were her “heroes,” and so it meant a lot that they weren’t critical of her body.
“You could have easily been like, ‘We don’t ever think about it. We’re naturally thin,’” Kaling said. “It was a kindness for you to acknowledge that, so I could see that in my heroes. It is really fascinating and nice that culture has changed so much.”
In the years since she first crossed paths with Fey and Poehler, Kaling has been on a wellness journey. She recently told Bustle in an April interview that she decided to lose weight after coming to the realization that she needs to “live at least 20 more years” for her family. (Kaling is the single mom of daughters Kit, 8, and Anne, 2, as well as son Spencer, 5. She’s never publicly disclosed the identity of her kids’ father.)
“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 told the outlet. “When I was younger, I would want to lose weight because of vanity reasons. 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.”
