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Ivy Snitzer was just a 20-year-old acting student when she was cast to play Gwyneth Paltrow‘s body double in the 2001 comedy Shallow Hal. Though working on the film proved to be “exciting” and “fun,” Snitzer revealed in a recent interview with The Guardian that she struggled with her body image and weight for years after the movie premiered.
In 2003, Snitzer had gastric band surgery, a weight loss surgery in which a silicone band is inserted into the stomach to restrict a person’s appetite and reduce its size. But she suffered a serious complication that left her living off of “sports drinks and watered-down nutritional shakes” for three months, The Guardian reports.
“I was so thin you could see my teeth through my face and my skin was all grey,” Snitzer recalled. “And I was just so bitchy all the time. I kind of alienated a lot of my friends. My mother was also dying; it was bleak. Humans shouldn’t have to experience how very bleak that particular time in my life was.”
It left her so malnourished she had to use an IV fluid bag almost daily for four months before the doctors were able to remove the gastric band. They also performed a gastric bypass operation to remove part of her stomach.
When asked why she chose to undergo the weight loss surgery, Snitzer replied: “Because I was supposed to! If you’re fat, you’re supposed to try to not be.” She maintained in her interview that her decision to get the surgery was not connected to her work in the movie, though she later acknowledged there may be some connection.
But she noted that she felt committed to being what she called “a good fatty” when filming ended. “I hated my body the way I was supposed to,” she said. “I ate a lot of salads. I had eating disorders that I was very proud of.”
When the film premiered, Snitzer said she began receiving backlash after she was invited to do TV and magazine interviews. She was accused of promoting obesity after she said in an interview, “It is not the worst thing in the world to be fat.”
But she ultimately has fond memories of starring in the film: “It was so exciting. It was just fun to be part of a movie – there are so few people who actually get to do that,” she recalled, before adding that Shallow Hal‘s Jack Black was “a delightful person” and Paltrow regularly complimented her acting.
“I love that it’s a cool thing I did one time,” she said. “It didn’t make me feel bad about myself. Until you know, other people started telling me I probably should have felt bad about myself.”
Now, Snitzer lives with her family in Philadelphia, where she owns an insurance agency.
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