Actions Speak Louder Than Words

While I was browsing People.com for my daily dose of celebrity gossip this morning, I happened to see that Jennifer Love Hewitt was featured alongside a big headline that read, "Jennifer Love Hewitt Advises Girls to 'Love the Way You Look.' Coincidentally, she was pictured in a white bikini, showing off her body that has significantly shrunk in recent days/months/years. Does anyone remember when she was photographed back in 2007 in a bikini and was publicly ridiculed for the way that she looked in the pictures?? She was raked over the coals for the shape of her body, and I remember reading about how she started dieting and working out to lose some of the weight after that happened. Here is a brief excerpt from an article written shortly after that time:

Late last year (2007) the blogosphere got pretty mean about actress Jennifer Love Hewitt looking a little heavier than normal. At the time she said she was a size 2 and that she wasn’t fat, but she mostly worried about how the attention would affect image-conscious girls who saw the media calling her fat. While she says the two aren’t connected, she’s lost 18 pounds in the last four months with the help of trainer Stevie Sant’Angelo.

Hmmm. It seems odd to me that those two things were not connected. But either way, I find it all the more ironic that she is doling out such advice to young women to love the way their bodies look, since her way of loving her body was to change hers! Jennifer Love Hypocrite?

While I cannot even begin to imagine the kind of pressure a female in Hollywood must face to conform to unrealistic standards of beauty, I also do not think that this justifies hypocrisy. If she loved what she looked like so much, why did she feel the need to change? She is sending such an unfortunate message to young women because while she is saying, "When I meet young girls, I'm always like, 'Just do me one favor, love what you look like right now – and remember I said it 10 years from now because it's the greatest gift I can give", her actions are telling a very different story. This quote was taken from the People.com article, which you can read by following this link. A few lines down, she says that she was so embarrassed by the pictures of her body taken in 2007 that she gave up eating 'her beloved donuts' and started fitting in workouts to her schedule so that she could 'get healthier.'

I am all for being healthy. Trust me. But it just seems like she is sending a very mixed message! And I think we are all too often inundated with mixed messages from the media, to the point that we fail to see things as they really are. It's helpful to expose mixed messages when we see them, and I would encourage you all to be mindful of what you see and hear! When it comes to the media, what you see is not what you get.

I guess I just feel bad for Jennifer Love Hewitt because I feel like she is really the one who is losing here. You never win when you have to change your outer appearance in order to love yourself and be happy. Yes, sometimes we do have to make changes so that we can become more healthy, but happiness and love are not dependent on or defined by how we look in a bikini, or how good we look in pictures. Happiness, love and beauty really do come from the inside out- not by losing 18 pounds in 4 months.