What’s Her Secret? Mindy Kaling Explains How She Slimmed Down in Quarantine

Simple solutions! Mindy Kaling opened up about her weight loss journey — and revealed that dieting had little to do with her success.

“I had my son in the first year of the pandemic in September 2020. … It was this almost extended maternity leave. I wasn’t going to be on camera, the studios were shut down,” the Office alum, 42, recently told Entertainment Tonight, explaining her different postpartum approaches after welcoming daughter Katherine, 4, and son Spencer, 18 months.

Kaling continued: “After I had my daughter I had to shoot a movie, like, two months later, so I was very much like, ‘Just give me grilled salmon and sautéed spinach. I’m going to eat that for three months.’”

Because she “didn’t have those pressures” to slim down amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Never Have I Ever creator didn’t feel rushed to trim her baby weight right away when she had her son. “When the world started coming back a little bit I thought, ‘This kind of eating … is probably not the way to go,’” she recalled, noting that she wasn’t in the habit of giving “any consideration” to what she was eating during the lockdowns.

With a few small changes, the Massachusetts native began to see results. “Honestly, I didn’t really do anything differently,” she confessed. “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.”

The Mindy Project alum has been candid about her body image over the years since her rise to stardom. In May 2021, she reflected on how pregnancy shifted her mindset, telling Shape, “I feel like in conversations about fitness and exercise, if you’re going to be talking about someone who’s healthy and fit, you have to be a hard body with, like, a six-pack.”

Kaling added at the time, “But that’s not really how it works, and I have learned to embrace [my body] in the past six months [since having a baby].”

The Sex Lives of College Girls producer raises her children as a single mom, which she noted during a May 2021 event “is not for everyone.” Kaling explained at the time that she was “only able to do it” with the help of a full-time nanny and other family members, including her father. She previously revealed that she “definitely” always saw motherhood as part of her journey, even without a partner.

“The best relationship I had in my life was the one with my mom,” she told Vogue India in December 2020. “It was so pure and so fun and uncomplicated, and I hope that I can have that with my son or daughter — if I’m lucky, with at least one of my kids — when they get older.”

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