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10 Best Celebrities on Body Image
by Ashley Hoffman | November 13, 2015 at 2:58 PM
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Isn’t it a real hoot how celebrities who happen to wear larger sizes are so often interviewed about how they’ve managed to love themselves at their various sizes while we continue to ask other celebrities about how they keep their girlish figures? Still, we do believe it’s important for famouses to discuss these issues because their highly quotable quotes spotlight body image stuff, and it’s important.

With that in mind, here are the very best celebrities on body image. Mindy Kaling, Dascha Polanco, and Rebel Wilson have all landed here for keeping it real about the self-love battle. Do tell us your favorite celebrities on body image in the comments. Let’s dive right in.

1. Dascha Polanco
Dascha
Woman is dropping knowledge all day with winning responses like this from Huffington Post’s body image panel:

I think that growing up in the United States where everybody is the generic size zero, I think that’s something that we all struggle with…Specifically when you work in entertainment it’s an issue, the moment you’re not a sample size, whatever that means. I keep on telling people that sample size for me is when you give me a sample and you let me try like a piece of cake. You know what I mean? That’s a sample. You can’t say a sample size and not have a sample of each size. I think that when I go into the store and they say ‘Oh I have a sample’ and I go ‘Oh OK so that means you have a sample 10, so I’m going to be able to fit into a sample 10.’ Don’t tell me you have a sample and the sample is a zero because that’s not what the norm for me is.

And she gave us this gem:

I think that I’m learning how to not make the insecurities a reason for me to not achieve my goals or go for my dreams, aspire to bigger things. I think that I still have those qualities but I am embracing them more and I’m learning to make those differences unique qualities as opposed to negative obstacles or thoughts. Weight has been an issue in my life. My siblings were way thinner and I was always bigger. Growing up the girls around me were thinner and I felt like I always had issues with image and stuff like that.

We’ll let Instagram stay peopled with women who don’t understand what language we’re speaking when we say “love handles” as long as we can have Dascha.

2. Mindy Kaling:
Fox 2012 Programming Presentation Post-Show Party
Queen gonna queen. On the groundbreaking discovery that people who are not super slim generally display tendencies associated with health like working out, Kaling told Vogue:

I’m also the recipient of a lot of backhanded compliments about it, where people are like, ‘It’s so nice that Mindy Kaling doesn’t feel she needs to subscribe to the ideals of beauty that other people do.’ And I’m like, I do subscribe. They’re like, ‘It’s so refreshing that Mindy feels comfortable to let herself go and be a fat sea monster!’ By the way, I run and work out. It takes a lot of effort to look like a normal/chubby woman.

On self-improvement, learning and growing as we all are:

There’s a whole list of things I would probably change about myself. For example, I’m always trying to lose fifteen pounds. But I never need to be skinny. I don’t want to be skinny. I’m constantly in a state of self-improvement but I don’t beat myself up over it.

And finally, talking to Parade about being marginalized, she said this beautiful thing:

There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art. I always get asked, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, ‘You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?’

3. Christina Hendricks
Christina
We think about WHAT WOULD JOAN DO roughly 18 times a day so when we ran into her at the Honor show, we had to ask her about how she came up with Joan’s strut on Mad Men, and she said: “I think it was that… you put on that tight dress and you put on all those undergarments and things and your body just sort of does it,” Hendricks said. “and the first scene that I had with her, she was sort of marching around the office and being very presentational, and it seemed to suit her. I just did it.” Yes she did, and she’s listed here because of how she told Health magazine about her thoughts on gaining fifteen pounds.

Back when I was modeling, the first time I went to Italy, I was having cappuccinos every day, and I gained 15 pounds. And I felt gorgeous!” Hendricks said in the previously mentioned Health Magazine spread. “I would take my clothes off in front of the mirror and be like ‘Oh, I look like a woman.’ And I felt beautiful, and I never tried to lose it, because I loved it.

She’s also talked about how shopping for threads that fit your yabbos can be a hassle, as we know. “If there’s anything to be learned from me it’s that I’m learning to celebrate what I was born with, even though it’s sometimes been inconvenient,” Hendricks told the Daily Mail in 2012. “Having larger breasts has made it harder for me to shop throughout the years, but I’ve learned to love it.”

4. Rebel Wilson
Rebel

Rebel Wilson’s bum overshadowed everything that happened at the MTV Movie Awards when, in huge angel wings and her version of the scrillion dollar bra (gemstones and tassels,) Wilson treated the world to her message by bending over to show everyone her “THINK” butt. (She was picking up the envelope for the winner of the best male performance, which she dropped on purpose.) “THINK” was obviously written where the word “PINK” stars on all the pants in Victoria’s Secret’s Juicy Couture-esque line of sleepwear. This is how you make fun of Victoria’s Secret in the clumsiest and most harmless way possible. According to Wilson, everyone’s an angel, and fantasy bras are a hilarious joke. Well done, Wilson.

Speaking of the stunt, she told she told People:

I think one of the good messages in the movie is that you’re all beautiful. I think sometimes girls look at Victoria’s Secret models and think that they have to model themselves after that, but I really don’t think that’s the best, even though they are called ‘models,’ they’re not the best people to model yourself after. I like to encourage girls to think, which is why I put that on my butt. It’s really about what’s up here [points to head], and not whats here [points to backside].

5. Kate Winslet
ate
Kate, middle name: “I Don’t Look Like That And I Don’t Desire To Look Like That,” Winslet is a bad mamma among bad mammas and lucky for us, she is not yet over discussing how she loves her body. Without directly putting family members on blast, she said she never heard a word of body positive encouragement from a single lady in her life, which is why she is deliberate about breaking with the classic mom tradition of telling your daughter she doesn’t look skinny enough with her own spawn. While filming Running Wild With Bear Grylls in some sort of mountainous region, she spoke to E! about the lasting harm negative body talk does to women, and how she tries to fill her daughter with Kate Winslet-style love.

When I grew up I never heard positive reinforcement about body image from any female in my life. That’s very damaging because then you’re programmed as a young woman to immediately scrutinize yourself on how your look and so I stand in front of the mirror and say to Mia, ‘We are so lucky we have a shape. We’re so lucky we’re curvy. We’re so lucky we’ve got good bums’, and she’ll say, ‘Mommy, I know, thank God.’

Taking reservations for Kate’s womb. And she also gave us this:

I have a crumble baby belly, boobs are worse for wear after two kids… I’m doing all right. I’m 33. I don’t look in the mirror and go, “Oh, I look fantastic!” Of course I don’t. Nobody is perfect. I just don’t believe in perfection. But I do believe in saying, “This is who I am and look at me not being perfect!” I’m proud of that.

We’ll never let go, Kate. We’ll never let go.

6. Amy Schumer
Amy
Amy Schumer delivers the truth about everyone’s insecurities in the most relatable way. She cuts right to the dark humor of our obsession with beauty and how it robs us of all other concerns like our jobs and reality. Her tale of a woman just doing her very best is packed full of conversations with the mirror, a shopping trip for a dress in her fantasy size at Wink, and barbed gender politics. Bonus: this woman just has dated magazine stories down to a science. (Our personal favorite: is your vagina too loose to hang onto a man?)

She’s tackled hawtness according to Hollywood from a personal perspective. If her material is truthful, then the geniuses in charge of Trainwreck advised her to lose weight, and this was her joke about it: “No we want you to be in the movie, but stop eating,” So the L.A. people gave her a trainer with a new meal plan that apparently involved hunger. Until her, we never had someone with this capacity for making body image issues this much fun. Yes, the struggle of this beautiful blonde white woman is real because unfortunately there are still idiots who also said a thinner actress would be better in the role Schumer herself wrote.

Remember her awesome nutritionist sketch in which Janeane Garofalo is the straight-talking nutritionist who works with every famous in the world? It brings us to our next best famous on body image.

7. Janeane Garofalo
Jan
Let’s take you back to that unforgettable time when intellectual straight shooter Janeane Garofalo really gave haut fashun the business back in ’95. You should watch her rage-filled book report rant on beauty ideals because it was wrenched from somewhere deep within her soul. (Based on this tirade, there’s a special place in hell for the delusional female journos who classified Cindy Crawford as “one of the bigger models.”) Anyway, her brilliant anti-lookism tirade is raining down on us like ten thousand Blockbuster gift cards twenty years later. Here’s the unmissable part:

OK I hate high fashion. I hate it. I hate supermodels as celebrity. I hate the fact that we reward people for being genetic freaks. I just think it’s abominable. We have the crisis of confidence that hits 13, 14 year old girls…Reviving Ophelia, read it’s a good book…14 million eating disorders in this country. It makes me sick. It makes me sick the way that women are the victims of lookism and that high fashion just feeds into coveting and vanity and all that is evil.

I hate them…I will not back down on this I don’t care how unlikable it makes me seem to you. I hate it. I hate models in general. And [justifiable up noise] when even female journalists will say, ‘Cindy Crawford, one of the bigger models, fuck you! Fuck you! Shut up! I hate you! You know you’re lying now shut up!’

When there are statistics…5’10 120 f*ck you! And stop making me feel bad about myself! Stop it TV and stop it movies! And until as women we all say ‘no we’re not going to change, nothing’s going to happen,’ so we’re our own worst enemies a lot of the time, but I still blame men.

8. Beyoncé
Bey
Oh, did you decide to whittle down, color correct, and remove any evidence of reality from Beyoncé’s body, pits, and skin for that bikini ad H&M? Actually, when you make a Beyoncé ad campaign more suitable, she speaks out against you. While her own images aren’t Photoshop-free, thanks to her Milky Way-sized fame, she’s introduced Vogue’s cover to a new shape, and she’s cleansing our eyes. It’s always the ideal time to cue up “Pretty Hurts,” and then slide into “Bootylicious.” Here’s your daily Bey on body love.

We do not value ourselves enough. Especially young people, [who] don’t really appreciate, how brilliant our bodies are. I’ve always been very, very specific, and very choosy—very choosy—about what I do with my body, and who I want to share that with,” she said, proving once again that she’s an omniscient, heavenly being of whom we are not worthy.

9. Chrissy Teigen
Chrissy
Stretch marks, as magazine ads have told us time and time again, don’t exist on people allowed to feel good about themselves. But Chrissy Teigen, one of our favorite speakers of truths, posted a jorts selfie so that she could give everyone a tour of her bruises and “stretchies.” Posts like these are one of Teigen’s patented curtain-lifting windows into her soul. She has often expressed interest in showing everyone what her face and body actually looks like, and she rises to the occasion when she has to defend the size of her pasta portion or fetus to internet haters. Girl, PREACH.

10. Laverne Cox
Lav

Could she be more charming? Probably not.

On the grueling work of body acceptance, she told Essence:

This is intense, and it’s hard. What I’ve been doing is looking in the mirror and listing all the things I have an issue with and then saying, ‘This is beautiful.’ I just go down the list and tell myself, ‘You have to accept that this is you today.’ I make time to do this.

After declining twice, your favorite finally posed naked in Allure’s annual nekked spread. Being an activist, she did it because she views herself as a possibility model. What she said:

I said no initially, thought about it, and said no again. But I’m a black transgender woman. I felt this could be really powerful for the communities that I represent. Black women are not often told that we’re beautiful unless we align with certain standards. Trans women certainly are not told we’re beautiful. Seeing a black transgender woman embracing and loving everything about her body might be inspiring for some folks. There’s a beauty in the things we think are imperfect. It sounds very cliche, but its true.

About the Author

Ashley Hoffman

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