For actor and producer Mindy Kalling— a self-proclaimed “chubby brunette girl” — this toxic belief made her feel “embarrassed” for wanting to talk about her love of exercise. “I’ve been in shape since I was 22 years old and I’ve been training four to five times a week ever since, but I never felt like that was something I could own because I didn’t look a certain way,” she says. Kaling. “I was worried that people’s reaction would be, ‘You don’t look like someone who works out four times a week.'”
But the truth is, there is no one way to look fit. Six-pack-abs (which have long been seen as the gold standard for fitness) are a total scam, and there’s a whole movement of fat-positive personal trainers proving that you can be healthy at any size. It took Kaling, 42, nearly two decades of “punishing” herself in the gym to take this lesson to heart. Now that she has, she has completely changed her relationship to her body.
“I used to think of my body as my brain with a few attachments – I never used to think of the gift it gives me every day just for being alive,” she says. “But then I had kids and I thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t just a container to carry my brain around.’ It’s what gave me my kids, and especially as a single mom, I really have to treat it right.”
These days, instead of forcing herself into grueling workouts in pursuit of a certain body type (she reportedly used to get up before dawn to work up a sweat on the treadmill before heading to the set of The office), Kaling focuses primarily on movement that brings him joy.
“I think the idea that it doesn’t have to be a punishment for it to be effective and make me feel grounded, focused and happy has been a big way my workouts have changed,” she says. “After I put my kids down for a nap, I’ll take 20 minutes and go for a walk around the block with my dad or talk to a friend from college while I’m taking a walk, and I feel so good that I’ve connected with someone, but also that I’ve gotten into this good move… And I stretch now, which isn’t something I worried about when I was younger, but now it’s a necessity since I’m in my 40s. It keeps me from hurting myself when I do exercise”.
More importantly, though, she’s no longer afraid to tell the world how much that move means to her. “I’m a person who loves to be in shape and I see myself the way I see myself,” she says. “Working out has improved my health and I want to be proud to say that I love it. I look like your average American woman and mother, and by acknowledging that I love to exercise, my hope is that other women will.” I feel like they can do that too.”
“I look like your average American woman and mom, and by embracing the fact that I love to exercise, my hope is that other women feel like they can too.” —Mindy Kaling
This ideology is arguably more pertinent this time of year, as we head into summer and the larger conversation shifts to “getting ready for the beach” (yes, even in 2022), something Kaling refuses to subscribe to. .
“I’m not really someone who necessarily thinks about how my body might look different at different times of the year, probably because I do these shows about young women who are 15-22, and a lot of that outdated thinking is just I’m not going to fly with them,” says Kaling, who is the brains behind Netflix I have never and HBOMax The sex life of college girls. “I work with these young actresses who are so confident and comfortable in their skin in a way that I wasn’t. It’s not that they don’t have challenges in their lives, but what I’ve noticed in these women who are literally half my age is that they don’t have the same hang-ups that I had. They’re playing golf, they’re walking, they’re swimming, they’re playing tennis, but he doesn’t use them. And as someone who is supposed to be his mentor, I don’t want to be that person who has those hang-ups. It’s not modern anymore.”
As a means of paying for this mentality even later, she is partnered with Propel to distribute four $25,000 grants to trainers across the country who are working to make fitness feel more inclusive. “[The trainers receiving the grants] They don’t look like the stereotypical Los Angeles coaches, but they are changing lives and doing so much for their communities,” says Kaling. “The best thing about this campaign is that it shows that everyone is in different places on their journey, and the people who are in shape they can look many different ways.
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