Hilary Duff: I care about being healthy & feeling good, not about being tiny
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We’ve been seeing Hilary Duff comment a lot over the past year on her health practices, from her crazy good interview in Women’s Health to her divulging that she sometimes drinks coffee in the morning as a way to stave off hunger. Whenever she weighs in, she qualifies her choices with the note of “do what’s best for you,” and she gets candid about mental wellbeing going hand-in-hand with physical health. It makes sense, then, that she’s become an ambassador for OLLY, makers of my favorite melatonin (along with many other excellent products for the awake hours). On the heels of hosting a back-to-school brunch with OLLY in New York last week, Hilary spoke with Yahoo! Life’s It Figures series about her current body image views:
On her awkward years existing on the internet: “It’s funny, to an extent,” she tells Yahoo Life of the pictures and memes that exist of her at all ages across the internet. “And then there’s some days where I’m like, ‘Wow, that was a really hard time in my life.’ It almost hurts for me to look at that girl.” While so many idolized and envied the life of the young star, the 35-year-old hasn’t been shy speaking out about the scrutiny that she faced as a public figure. “The magazines were mean and the press was mean,” she says. The cruel remarks that were made about her body, specifically, led Duff to develop an eating disorder at 17 years old.
‘Be your own beauty icon’: “I don’t know what’s real anymore. Everything’s so heavily edited and filtered,” she tells Yahoo Life. “You just have to experiment and find out what works for you and what feels good… Kind of be your own beauty icon.” It’s a perspective that Duff partially credits to age. “As I get older, I’m more happy with who I am and how I look,” she says. “I care about being healthy, I care about feeling good in my clothes, but I don’t care about being tiny.”
Pregnancy & motherhood have helped her body image: “I’ve had three kids, I’m obsessed with them. I loved being able to grow them and give birth to them,” she says. “It did change my mindset to understand my body was like meant to do this and it’s changing. It just kind of forced me into a different zone.” She’s now mindful about speaking positively about bodies and food as a parent. “Especially having girls, I’m so careful about what I say and the rules that we follow at home.” Around all three of her children—son Luca Cruz, 11, who she shares with her ex-husband Mike Comrie, and two daughters, Banks Violet, 4, and Mae James, 2, with husband Matthew Koma—Duff preaches one thing: “We only have one body in this life and we have to take care of it. We don’t deprive it,” Duff says.
It starts so young: “My daughter is four and she was looking in the mirror the other day, and she was like, ‘My tummy is big.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? You’re the exact size that you’re supposed to be,’” Duff recalls. “Your belly is holding in all of your organs. You haven’t stretched out tall yet, you are exactly how you’re supposed to be.”
I am so here for the influx of body-positive stories we’ve been getting from celeb mamas lately. Granted, Hilary didn’t recently give birth, but she clearly credits the experience of pregnancy with transforming her body image–no easy feat after having your entire teenagedom be public and live on digitally. I both loved and was heartbroken over the story of her daughter already saying her tummy was big. Argh! How do we plug into this mentality so young? I thought Hilary handled it really well, though. She responded in a way that made sense to a four-year-old. Or maybe I just like her response because I, too, am waiting to stretch out tall.
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