Nuh-uh! Jennifer Lopez was once told to lose weight — and it didn’t fly. The “Ain’t Your Mama” singer, 46, told a fan during a Shades of Blue For Your Consideration Emmy event in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 9, that back in the day, when she was struggling to establish herself in Hollywood, people (including her own manager) used to tell her she needed to be thinner.
“They kept telling me to lose weight, and I was a dancer, and I was athletic, and even my manager at the time who I no longer work with was telling me, ‘You need to lose weight. You need to be thinner,'” she told a fan who mentioned that she inspired her. “I was like, ‘No I don’t. If I lose any more weight, it won’t be me.’ You know what I mean?”
“It was a fight,” Lopez continued. “It was definitely a fight, and so it’s good to hear that it helped anybody in some way, because at the end of the day I was just trying to be myself without trying to fit into a mold of what everybody else should be.”
The multihyphenate previously told Glamour magazine in 2011 that she fired her then-manager over weight comments.
“I was just so infuriated that somebody said you couldn’t have a little extra meat on you — because I was by no means fat!” Lopez recalled at the time. “That was so mean and closed-minded. … I was like: ‘No, this is who I am and this is the type of woman that I grew up with and it’s beautiful. There’s no reason to be anybody but myself.'”
While chatting with Us Weekly in May 2015 for the Best Bodies issue, Lopez revealed that she stays fit by working out with celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson and through dance rehearsals.
“I live a healthy lifestyle, I try to live a healthy lifestyle,” she told Us.