15 Celebrities Who’ve Spoken Out About Body Image

Rugby star and Olympic medalist Ilona Maher is using her platform to challenge the narrow ideals surrounding female athletes and femininity. In 2022, she shared a viral Instagram reel celebrating her muscular build. "This is the body of a professional athlete,” she said. “This is the body of an Olympian. It's not perfect. It's not completely lean. It's not completely toned, but this body is amazing, and it does amazing things for me."

She’s since built an Instagram following of over 5 million and still routinely posts body-positive content. In a 2024 Instagram reel, Maher encouraged her followers to prioritize performance over physical appearance. “I say that it’s okay to want to see how strong and powerful your body can be,” she said.

Paula D. Atkinson, a licensed independent clinical social worker and psychotherapist in private practice in Palm Springs, California, loves Maher’s message. “Your body is on your side, and true health comes from being on your body's side,” Atkinson says.

Selena Gomez has spoken out about prioritizing her body’s health over appearance. Gomez, who has an autoimmune disease called lupus, shared her experience dealing with the public scrutiny of her medication-related weight gain in a 2023 episode of Dear…: "I was being shamed for gaining weight because of my lupus. I would go online and post a picture and say, 'It doesn't matter.' All the while, being in the room posting and crying my eyes out, because nobody deserves to hear those things."

During a 2023 TikTok Live, Gomez said, "I just want people to know that you're beautiful and you're wonderful. We have days where maybe we feel [bad], but I would much rather be healthy and take care of myself. My medications are important, and I believe they are what helps me."

It isn’t just women wrestling with the pressure to reach an unrealistic standard. In a 2023 podcast interview, Taylor Lautner opened up about overcoming body image issues stemming from his experience filming the Twilight saga.

"For so long, I told myself, 'If I get my body back to where I want it to be, then I'm gonna be happy again," he said. Instead, he found he needed to prioritize his mental well-being. "In order to get my body physically healthy, it took my mind getting healthy first,” he said.

Lautner’s advice? "Don't find happiness in what you want your body to look like," he said. “Don't think just because you lose the 20 pounds or put on the muscle, you're going to wake up, look in the mirror, and all of a sudden be happy. That's not where you should be finding value.”

Lautner isn’t alone in this experience. After playing a lead in Baywatch (a 2017 movie reboot of the popular 1990s TV series), fans associated Zac Efron with his chiseled physique and wasted no time pointing out when he shifted to more of a “dad bod.”

But in an interview with Men’s Health in 2022, Efron talked about how he never wants to resort to the methods it took to achieve that lifeguard body again, and in his opinion, nor should anybody else.

The picture-perfect body came at the price of diuretics, overtraining, poor sleep, and the same three meals every day. “I started to develop insomnia,” he said in the interview. “And I fell into a pretty bad depression for a long time.”

It took the actor six months after filming to feel normal again, he said in the interview.

He wants people who aspire to that body type to know he ruined his own health in pursuit of that goal. Efron told Men’s Health that moving forward, he is looking for deeper transformations in his career, not just physical transformations.

He's gone on to bulk up and pile on muscle for his role as the tragic wrestling legend Kevin von Erich, but Efron told ExtraTV that he found the process more fun. "It was more heavy bodybuilding stuff... I wouldn't do it today, but it's really neat to do it for a character," he said.

With over half a million Instagram followers, yoga instructor and author Jessamyn Stanley uses her influence to encourage others to accept their bodies as they are.

“There are whole years of my life where I don’t have any photographs because I was so afraid to look at myself,” she explained in a 2021 interview with Bon Appétit. “By taking photographs of myself for my yoga practice, I really came to see the hateful things that I say and think about myself, and began to take responsibility for them. Accepting the way that I see myself has helped me have a deeper relationship with myself.”

Grammy-winning artist Alicia Keys has famously attended award shows and events makeup-free, embracing her natural beauty. “I was taking on these tremendously oppressive beauty standards that I thought somehow applied to me in regards to being perfect, and I obviously rebelled against that,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. “I found my way around to the fact that I get to create my beauty standard. I get to choose what is beauty to me and how I want to express that.”

Some days she still chooses to wear makeup, Keys shared in a 2023 Vogue interview. “I'm at a point in my journey now where I’m able to see my own power. Getting ready is all about feeling good, and I love the getting ready part,” she said.

Another celebrity who’s famously gone makeup-free is Pamela Anderson. “I was pretty insecure as a kid, and I found ways to manage that insecurity by wearing a lot of makeup and inhabiting these characters,” she said in a 2024 interview with Glamour. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve peeled back the layers, and I’ve gotten closer to myself and remember what my original thoughts and feelings are.”

Anderson added, “Anti-aging is a lie. We’re getting older no matter what. Things change, and if you can find a sense of humor in it, it’s better.”

Kate Winslet has long talked about how years of body shaming impacted her as a young person. As a result, she’s an outspoken advocate for self-acceptance and confidence. “Life is too short,” she told the BBC in 2024. “I don’t want to look back and go, 'Why did I worry about that thing?' And so, guess what? I don’t worry anymore.”

Winslet has rejected the societal pressures to diet and undergo cosmetic procedures. In a 2024 Harper’s Bazaar interview, she addressed whether she minds looking less than perfect in her work. “The opposite. I take pride in it because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up,” she said. “I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate."

Veteran actor Jamie Lee Curtis has been part of the conversation around what it means to have a healthy body image for decades.

In 2002, she posed for a before and after photo shoot for the September issue of More magazine, which detailed the time it took a team of professionals to transform the 43-year-old mother of two children into her red-carpet-ready look. SFGate.com reported in August 2002 that the shoot was Curtis’s idea.

And in a 2022 Instagram post, published while Curtis was promoting Everything Everywhere All at Once, Curtis (now 67 years old) said about her character’s round belly, “I want there to be no concealing of anything. I've been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies.”

Bucking that societal norm was freeing, she added. “I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench to hide the reality. That was my goal. I have never felt more free creatively and physically,” she said.

In a 2022 interview with The New York Times, Curtis said she made it clear that she “would like to not be sucking my stomach in for the entire movie.” And she felt great about it. “All I’m interested in is freedom as a performer, and I don’t get that opportunity very often. But the times I’ve been able to be free, I’m on fire,” she said.

The TV host and carpenter (who famously yelled, “Move that bus!” on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) took to Instagram in 2022 to detail his experience being shamed by internet trolls over his appearance.

“I posted a video recently of myself dancing on the beach, with my shorts hiked up,” he began. “What was an honest moment of just trying to make my wife laugh was then picked apart by strangers — with a lot of views comes a lot of hate! Comments like ‘disgusting,’ ‘gross,’ ‘omg, he’s so old now,’ ‘grandpa,’ and ‘he got fat’ (which btw I’m pushing my stomach out but ok).”

He continued, “No, I don’t have a six-pack anymore or a luscious head of hair (with frosted tips). But what I do have is wisdom, empathy, and life lessons, and at 57 years old, I’ve TRULY never been happier! Anyways, all this to say: I’m human, and I have feelings. Yes, I am older, but I think it’s pretty cool.”

The Good Place actor and activist Jameela Jamil cautions against the abuse of appetite suppressants for excessive weight loss. “The amount of people in my industry just taking [semaglutide] to go from slim to super skinny, to finally achieve the obedient waif physique to fit the obedient sample sizes has been hard to watch,” she wrote on Instagram in 2024.

Dr. Markey agrees. Doctors often prescribe GLP-1 medications without checking for a history or symptoms of an eating disorder, she says. Medicated appetite suppression can “slide into rigid control and disorder,” Markey says.

“I had anorexia for about 20 years,” Jamil shared during a 2024 podcast interview. “That was a very sad and very bad journey that was perpetuated largely by our culture with an obsession around female thinness.”

She’s since changed her perspective. “I practice body neutrality, which has been a complete, almost divorce from my body,” she said. “I don’t look at it any longer as a reflection of me. It’s a vessel that carries around my brain — and now all I care about, genuinely, is my brain [and] my spirit.”

There are times when GLP-1s may be appropriate as treatment for health issues. Serena Williams, a spokesperson for telehealth provider Ro, has been vocal about how the medication has benefited her health.

“I’ve heard negative comments, along with a tremendous amount of positive comments, about my body my entire life,” she told Vogue in a 2025 interview. “For lack of a better way to say it, I don’t really care what people are saying about my body anymore. But what is important to me is transparency. I feel like a lot of people have this stigma on GLP-1s and say things like, ‘Oh, lazy people do it,’ or ‘If you’re working hard enough, you don’t need that.’ I know for a fact from my experience that it’s simply not true.”

She told People in a 2026 interview, “Something I've seen improvement on recently were just my numbers, huge improvements. I just feel like I'm at my healthiest. And that's not something I could say even when I was a professional athlete.”

Paralympian Madison de Tozario opened up about her experience overcoming body image issues in a 2022 interview with Para Sport. “Finding wheelchair racing, for the first time in my life, I found the world that was truly designed for me by people that look like me,” she said.

“This body that I had grown to resent a little bit because it wasn't my idea of perfect, what I’ve been told it needed to be, was suddenly perfect for wheelchair racing,” she continued. “Everything that I disliked about it was suddenly required for this sport, and I learned to love my body through everything that this sport took me through.”

De Tozario sees athletics as a way to connect more deeply with herself. “It’s not just accomplishments, not just achievements or world titles or anything like that, but who it allowed me to become,” she said. “The biggest impact that sport can have on and for people with disabilities is learning to reclaim and to own your physical self.”

After publicly coming out as transgender in 2020, Elliot Page shared how gender-affirming care helped him find happiness in his body in a 2023 Instagram post. “I never thought I could experience this, the joy I feel in my body. I am so grateful for what gender-affirming care has allowed me,” he said.

"I feel a way that I really never thought possible for a long, long time," Page said on a 2022 episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers. "So that's really what I'm focusing on and embracing the most. But, of course, moments can be overwhelming."

Model and entrepreneur Winnie Harlow is a passionate advocate for vitiligo and body positivity.

“Growing up, I never saw people who looked like me,” she said in a 2026 interview. “There also wasn’t much information. I really wanted to learn more about vitiligo, but I couldn’t, because the research just wasn’t there. Now that there’s so much more information about vitiligo, I wanted to make sure it was readily accessible to anyone looking for it. For so long, I didn’t have that representation. So to be that and to bring awareness to resources like ThisIsVitiligo.com feels full circle.”

She said, “People think confidence is something you arrive at. But it’s not really a becoming. It’s a choice you make every day. I may have been confident from the beginning, but I’m not confident every day. You’re not going to feel super cute all the time, but you can still choose to stand tall.”