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She shot to fame playing customer service representative Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office.
Fast forward 20 years, and Mindy Kaling looks slimmer than ever thanks to her incredible 40lb weight-loss transformation.
The actress, 46, displayed her trim new figure as she stepped out at the Fashion Trust Awards in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
But her weight-loss journey hasn’t been easy. She has long spoken about the challenges she’s faced, including years of fat-shaming and what she once described as ‘backhanded compliments.’
In her 2011 memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, she reflected: ‘I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t chubby… Like being Indian, being chubby feels like it is just part of my permanent deal!’
With the actress now in a new chapter of her life, the Daily Mail takes a look at Mindy’s weight-loss journey and her secret to dropping the pounds.
Mindy began her weight-loss journey in high school after being told she would be ‘really pretty if you lost weight’.
She decided to come up with a makeshift diet formula, in which she would only eat half of whatever food she had on her plate.
This included no dessert either.
In two months, she lost 30lb without exercising and thought her school bully would finally leave her alone, but ‘he didn’t,’ she wrote in her memoir.
Mindy considered herself a ‘normal weight’ for a while, but then gained 35lb during her first year at college.
She took to the gym to lose it again, but realised that she would be ‘chubby for life’ due to her having no hobbies except dieting.
The actress wrote: ‘Ultimately, the main reasons why I will be chubby for life are (1) I have virtually no hobbies except dieting.
‘I can’t speak any non-English languages, knit, ski, scrapbook or cook. I have no pets. I don’t know how to do drugs. I lost my passport three years ago when I moved into my house and never got it renewed.
‘Video games scare me because they all seem to simulate situations I’d hate to be in, like war or stealing cars.
‘So if I ever lost weight I would also lose my only hobby; (2) I have no discipline; I’m like if Private Benjamin had never toughened up but, in fact, got worse; (3) Guys I’ve dated have been into me the way I am; and (4) I’m pretty happy with the way I look, so long as I don’t break a beach chair.’
Mindy was just 24 years old when she became a writer and actor on the hit sitcom The Office.
However, after shooting to fame in the series, the actress recalled a moment when her confidence was shattered when a fellow writer made fun of her weight.
During an appearance on Good Morning America in 2021, the actress revealed that her co-star advised that her character should lose 15lb.
‘This is my greatest insecurity and someone just called it out,’ she said. ‘It’s really devastating.’
Mindy continued: ‘I had a reckoning where I’m like, ‘People are scrutinising [me], and not only are they scrutinising [me], they’re verbalising their displeasure with how I look because I don’t look a certain way’.
‘That kind of dissonance has really affected so much of what I write about [and] the kind of characters I play.’
‘Almost all of those kinds of things [in my work] come from something really real,’ she said.
Mindy also said that there were not many opportunities for women who looked like her when she first started out in the industry.
She explained: ‘On TV, if you were really thin, then you could be the lead. Otherwise, you had to be like 250lb, and you had to be the slapstick comic relief.
‘But what was crazy, what was left out, is just like this range of people, which is a majority of American women over the age of 24.
‘What if you’re like a size 12 and you want to just live your life and look cute and date?
‘At that time, when I wrote Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? in 2011, it was like a no man’s land. That has really changed, I think.’
In 2022, Mindy started dropping the pounds, which she has achieved through simple exercises and eating foods in moderation rather than sticking to a strict diet.
She told ET at the time that she lost weight without limiting herself to which foods she can or cannot eat.
‘I eat what I like to eat. If I do any kind of restrictive diet, it never really works for me. I just eat less of it. I wish there was something more juicy or dynamic about the way that I’ve lost a little bit of weight, but that’s the way I’ve done it.’
‘I’m never going to be someone who can just have spinach and salmon every day,’ she previously told Today. ‘I just am really for the first time in my life, trying moderation, and I love it.’
The actress has additionally emphasised the importance of drinking plenty of water each day.
‘That’s a huge weight off my shoulders because I think hydration is so key. Half the times I’m in a bad mood it’s because I’m not hydrated, so for me that’s super important,’ she told Women’s Health.
Around this time, rumours began circulating that it was due to using the weight loss drug Ozempic.
However, the Running Point co-creator has never admitted to taking a trendy GLP-1 agonist drug but, rather, credited her slimmed down frame to portion control, increased hydration, weight training, yoga and 15 to 20-mile walks per week.
‘In my 20s, I had this very certain idea of what ‘being fit’ really meant,’ she told E! News.
‘You had to run a seven-minute mile and eat this amount of carbs and proteins. It took me a long time to realise that there are lots of different ways to be fit.’
In 2023, she opened up about how she started on her health journey after having children.
She is a mother to Katherine ‘Kit’ Swati Kaling, eight, Spencer ‘Spike’ Avu Kaling, five, and Anne Kaling, who turned two in February.
Mindy has never shared the identity of her children’s father, though many fans have speculated it could be their godfather, BJ Novak, her co-star-slash-fellow showrunner on The Office, based on their on-screen chemistry and longtime friendship.
‘Look, I know I’m clearly materialistic, but the best birthday gift to me, for the rest of my life, are these two guys,’ she wrote about her two eldest kids on Instagram in 2023, the year before she welcomed her third child.
‘I was never a ‘kid’ person. When my mom passed through, it just clicked in me: I wanted kids with such intense certainty. I bet some of you can relate.’
‘I’m just trying to be present for them (hard for me! I’m impatient!), being up for anything (again hard for me, I am not whimsical!), and stay healthy for these two guys (ALSO hard! I just want to eat cheesesteaks every meal in front of the TV) for until I’m an old gray skeleton they’re like ‘Mom, you gotta go.’
‘My doctor told me that this year I was the healthiest I’ve been in years. That’s a pretty d*** good gift, right?’
Mindy also focuses on strength training, which she also opened up to the outlet about.
‘I remember as a kid, always hearing ‘When you get older, you lose muscle mass. You need to start lifting.’ But so much of the focus when I was younger was ‘How do I be skinny?”
Speaking with People last year, she described herself as a workout ‘hobbyist’ who loves all types of different exercises, ranging from tai chi to pilates and strength training,
‘I don’t have to be like the expert at the thing to really enjoy it and to get a great workout,’ she said.
‘Surprising the body with lots of different things, I think, is really good, particularly for my body … I’ve really been mixing it up and knowing that if a workout doesn’t necessarily make me soak my clothes with sweat, that it still was a good workout… It does not have to be punishing.’
Mindy has described how she incorporates working out into her busy schedule during an interview on Today: ‘Sometimes I’ll be like, “Well, I have four different times today where I have ten minutes, so let’s just walk instead of sitting down and checking Instagram.”‘
In January this year, Mindy addressed her major weight-loss transformation in a social media post while sharing throwback photos from nearly a decade ago.
The actress admitted she ‘almost didn’t post because I look different,’ but avoided touching on the ongoing rumours that she used weight loss jabs to lose weight.
For the past year, she has consistently shown off her slimmer physique amid her personal health journey.
The screenwriter and producer partook in the 2016 challenge, in which social media users posted throwback photos to reflect on the past decade.
‘I saw this 2016 trend and loved it and almost didn’t post because I look different but these pics are too fun not to share,’ she wrote in her caption before adding in parentheses about other people feeling the same.
