Wow, The Tabloids Really Loved to Body-Shame Teenage Hilary Duff

(CONTENT WARNING: This issue discusses body dysmorphia and disordered eating.)

When I was a teenager, the Disney Channel stars were a very big deal. Even I, who did not have the Disney Channel at that point in my life, could not escape the likes of The Suite Life, Even Stevens, That's So Raven, and, eventually, Hannah Montana and High School Musical. I did, however, watch a lot of Lizzie McGuire. It was a cute show about adolescence that was pretty innocent but not without a focus on some hard-hitting issues like body image. The series made a star of Hilary Duff, a bright-eyed and wide-smiling actress who had been acting on TV since she was eight. Lizzie McGuire made her a thoroughly early-2000s teen idol, one who Disney was eager to mould into the face of its network. They moulded her into a clean-cut actor and singer who seemed destined for mainstream success. Her maturation into adulthood, alas, coincided with some of the worst excesses of the tabloid press.

It started when she was still in her teens. After dating fellow teen star Aaron Carter, she ended up in the headlines as part of a love triangle with Lindsay Lohan. When she was 16, she started dating Joel Madden, the lead singer of Good Charlotte, who was 25 at the time. In 2022, she would open up about her "horrifying" experiences with body dysmorphia and an eating disorder during her teens. The mid-2000s were a time when every single woman who was a size 8 or smaller was derided as too fat to live by the media.

We’ve talked a lot about celebrity diets in recent weeks, not that such topics have ever been irrelevant. Currently, as thinspo makes a terrifying comeback, I’ve seen an uptick in people poring over celebrities’ reported or alleged diets for inspiration and a kind of gawking thrill over how the other half lives. When I was a teen, around the same time as Duff, it felt like every magazine aimed at women had a new fad diet promising drastic weight loss over extended periods of time. Lose one stone in one week! Don’t be like that slim singer who dares to have more than 4% body fat!

Hilary Duff was never fat. Not even close. And yet, when I was a teen, I remember reading SO many comments online about how she was “fat-thin.” What did that mean, you ask? Well, because she was skinny but had perfectly normal arms that weren’t gladiator-level buff, she was teeeeechnically also fat! See, it totally makes sense. Softness, by which I mean having a completely normal frame for a teenage girl, was deemed unacceptable, and poor Hilary Duff, who had to go through puberty in the public eye, was derided for it.

It is worth noting that, amid all of this fatphobia, the “they’ve gotten too skinny” scare of the decade was also impossible to ignore. Mary Kate Olson struggled with anorexia, and the tabloids described her as “wasting away” and pointed at her “skeletal figure” with barely veiled glee. Nicole Ritchie was mocked for being “the fat one” on The Simple Life, but when she lost a ton of weight, the same people wouldn’t stop talking about how she was on the verge of death.

For all of the “concern” over women who did get thinner, skinniness was still the prized norm. So, when Duff began losing weight during a time she has now admitted was plagued by body dysmorphia and disordered eating, the press cheered her on. Us Weekly put her on the cover of a July 2007 issue (in a bikini, of course). Heralding her “diet secrets—and how she almost went too far.” It’s accompanied by a photograph of her “before” body, which is still very slim.

A report on her alleged diet in 2005 from one magazine shows her changing form “through thick and thin”, from ages 16 to 18. They got a doctor to estimate her weight from the shown photographs, which is astonishingly unethical, but also something that happened all the time in these magazines. The diet they share as her “secret” to weight loss has a grand total daily calorie count of… 1108.

That’s starvation mode, by the way. It’s well below what an adult woman is recommended to eat and unmanageable for someone going through puberty. The exercise regime – 21 laps of swimming and four hour-long reformer pilates workouts a week – isn’t as extreme as I was expecting, but it also seems pretty unsustainable on that number of calories. But hey, thin is in, right?

It’s a pretty bleak diet, one where occasional “chips and salsa” for a snack is so exciting that it merits an exclamation point. Only one spoonful of reduced-fat dressing on your salad, 2 percent milk in your coffee, and something called Kashi cereal. This is the only brand name mentioned (it’s a whole grain cereal company that's widely marketed as a health food), which made me wonder if this was stealth sponsored content. It’s not as weird as some celebrity diets – at least it has solid foods – but it’s also a pretty familiar cycle of “clean foods”, low-fat dressings, and nuts for snacks (Yolanda Hadid’s ears just perked up.) It wouldn’t be surprising to see some TikToker doing this exact diet in 2026.

Nowadays, Duff is a mother of three and has relaunched her singing career with much success for a certain kind of nostalgic millennial. She’s been honest about her eating disorder, and her attitude towards health and her body in the press has been, like many women in the spotlight, complicated. She was on the cover of Women’s Health to promote Ladder, a fitness app she’s collaborated with as part of her upcoming tour prep (she’d previously posed nude for another issue.) In one 2024 interview, she admitted that she, like Gwyneth Paltrow, sometimes just drinks coffee in the morning "to starve off the hunger." The nightmare of fame as a woman is that your body will always be a battlefield of discourse.