Jessica Simpson is a proud body-positive advocate, which she’s trying to instill in her three children.
“My kids have seen me [still] being scrutinized and it’s very confusing to them because they’re like, ‘Well I don’t even understand this, why don’t they just say you look pretty, Mom? You look pretty,’” Simpson, 43, said of daughters Maxwell, 11, and Birdie, 4, and son Ace, 10, during a Friday, August 25, interview with Access Hollywood. “And I’m like, ‘Honey, I wish I could explain it.’ I wish I could say, ‘For me, it has gotten better but it still remains the same and I don’t know why but it’s OK.’”
She continued: “I have been every size [and] I do understand every body, every woman, their mentality and how deserving they are of fashion and style and it’s just such a natural thing for me so I have to like I tell my kids how you feel about yourself is how you should feel.”
Simpson explained to the outlet that she aims to teach her and husband Eric Johnson’s kids that “you don’t dress for anybody else” and that “you don’t try to look like anybody else.”
“Truly you don’t need to be anybody [else’s] size,” the Jessica Simpson Collection designer told the outlet. “Maxwell is the tallest in her grade and she’s like, ‘Should I be insecure?’ I’m, like, the fact that you’re asking me if you should be insecure means absolutely not. You’re comfortable, you stay comfortable, you be you and I think that more than weight that people have focused on we need to focus on our mentality about even talking about weight. I think it just doesn’t need to be a conversation.”
While Simpson has since slimmed down after years of struggling with her weight, she hasn’t seen it as a journey to shed pounds.
“I don’t really look at it as a weight loss journey. I think it’s a journey of empowerment and self-love and acceptance,” she exclusively told Us Weekly in April 2022. “It’s one of those things [where] it’s, like, we all want what we can’t have. We all want the body type that we aren’t [and] that we can’t change. So it’s about accepting and loving ourselves for who we are.”
Simpson further praised the importance of “setting small goals” to eventually see big rewards. “When you work really hard to look and feel the way that you do in a very happy moment, especially with your children, it is very empowering and it made me so emotional,” she told Us. “I was really proud. I was like, ‘Here I go, I’m doing it.’ … My babies are worth the weight gain.”
As Simpson started to slim down, many social media users started speculating that her wellness journey was a result of trying the controversial weight loss drug Ozempic.
“Oh Lord, it is not,” she told Bustle in an interview published last month, shutting down the claims. “It’s willpower. Do people want me to be drinking again? Because that’s when I was heavier. Or they want me to be having another baby? My body can’t do it. … Am I going to let the negativity derail me? No, I’m too old for that. I am too connected to myself right now to let that derail me.”
