Mindy Kaling on Weight Loss: It’s About Living for My Kids

Mindy Kaling has thoughts about the fascination with her body — and she’s not dismissing it. She actually gets it.

In a wide-ranging new cover interview with Bustle, published May 19, the 46-year-old writer, producer, and actress addressed the relentless public attention on her physical transformation with a kind of clear-eyed empathy that’s very on-brand for her. “It’s sometimes no fun when one of your favorite actors loses weight,” she said. “You have an idea of what they were like when you grew attached to them, and it made them endear themselves to you.”

“Of course, it’s never a joy to be scrutinized, but also I truly understand it, as someone who consumes pop culture.”

It’s a remarkably self-aware response from someone who has been on the receiving end of years of body commentary — and who once wrote openly about her complicated relationship with her weight in her 2011 essay collection Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Back then, she called herself a “normal-slash-chubby woman” and detailed fad diets and childhood insecurities with her signature humor. Now the conversation has shifted, and so has her relationship to it.

The motivation behind her weight loss, she says, has nothing to do with how she looks. “When I was younger, I would want to lose weight because of vanity reasons,” Kaling explained. “Now I want to lose weight or have lost weight because I want to stave off things like diabetes. I had it on both sides of my family, and trying to avoid those kinds of things will, I think, help longevity for me, and that’s my goal.”

And the goal is personal in the most grounding way possible. She has three kids — Katherine, known as Kit, who is 8; Spencer Tracy, 5; and Anne, 2 — and she needs to be around for them. “I have to live at least 20 more years” for her kids, she quipped. As for how she actually feels day to day? “Do I wake up every day being like, ‘I look amazing and I’m so gorgeous’? No, unsurprisingly, but I truly feel so healthy.”

She’s also hinted that she may write about the journey eventually. For now, though, she’s keeping the boundary exactly where she wants it: at the why, not the how.

The BJ Novak Question — And Why She Doesn’t Mind Answering It

The Bustle interview, which takes place at Kaling’s office at LA Center Studios, offers a rare, intimate look at how she actually lives and works. Her workspace is a mini-museum: baseball hats from shows she’s made, her old Dartmouth mailbox gifted by her alma mater, a framed needlepoint that reads “Never Complain, Never Explain” — a gift from her close friend and ex BJ Novak — and a framed selfie of the two of them sitting alongside photos of her kids.

The Novak question is, predictably, one that follows Kaling everywhere. The two dated on and off from 2004 to 2007 while working together on The Office, and their relationship has never fully resolved itself into something the public can easily categorize — which is exactly what makes it so compelling. He’s the godfather of all three of her children. They call each other “soup snakes,” a reference to the show’s soulmates bit. He appeared in The Devil Wears Prada 2, and Kaling’s Instagram story the morning after seeing it confirmed she went to a solo 9:30 a.m. showing.

“He really is in our family, and I love talking about him because my kids adore him, and he’s such a huge part of our life,” she said. “But I also know that it gives people a lot of ideas. If I was just watching it from the outside, I would have the same questions and the same reactions.”

As for her own romantic life: she’s not looking. In an Armchair Expert interview last year, she said she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a crush. That’s still true. “I obviously have eyes and ears, and if there was someone that I had a crush on, of course I would react to that, but right now, there is not anyone out there,” she said. “It is crazy for someone like me, who only wrote about the pursuit of romance for so much of my life, to be very happy and content without a partner.”

The Life She Built — And the One She Planned

Kaling’s original life plan was almost aggressively specific: married at 24, first baby at 27, family complete by 32. She got the career — landing a job in The Office writers’ room at exactly 24 — but “literally none of that happened” on the personal side. “All I wanted was a serious boyfriend and to follow this path that I’d set out for myself. I remember feeling like an overachiever at work and just wishing that my personal life matched my professional success — and it didn’t.”

She’s never revealed who her children’s father is, and she’s not ready to do that yet. “The ramifications are so immediate for them that I just want to make sure that however I talk about it is in a way that really respects their privacy,” she said, leaving open the possibility that she might address it when they’re older.

What she will say is that the decision to become a single mother “felt really crazy” — and that her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2012 transformed her desire for kids from a vague someday plan into “an insane certainty.” “It was not cerebral at all. It was just a decision that was completely moved by my soul.”

Kate Hudson, who stars alongside Kaling on Running Point, put it plainly: “She’s such a good mom. It’s so impressive to me when women can have so much that they’re doing and be in so many places and still be able to prioritize, always, her kids. She does that in spades.”

What’s Next: A New Show, and a Career She’s Still Expanding

All of this is happening as Kaling is gearing up to launch her newest project. Not Suitable for Work premieres June 2 on Hulu, and she considers it the third chapter of a loose coming-of-age trilogy that began with Never Have I Ever and continued through The Sex Lives of College Girls. The new show follows a group of neighbors navigating their early 20s and early careers in New York — and Kaling has scattered pieces of her younger self across each of the lead characters.

She’s also currently running the writers’ rooms for Not Suitable for Work Season 2 and Running Point Season 3 simultaneously, in offices down the hall from each other in that same LA building. Her Running Point co-creator Ike Barinholtz, who also starred alongside her on The Mindy Project, says watching her balance it all has been consistently impressive. “She’s really gone from someone who was, I would say, almost a workaholic type A to having a pretty good balance now,” he said. “She’s able to, at four or five o’clock, be like, ‘OK, I’m going to make dinner for my kids.’”

Kaling also wants to return to acting — she’s been mostly behind the camera for the past few years, and says “sooner rather than later, I’d love to come back.” One idea she’s actively mulling: a show about dating in LA in your 40s. “Whether you were never married or divorced or widowed, what does that look like?” she said. “That’s the kind of show that I would want to watch.”

Twenty-plus years into a career she’s built entirely on her own terms, Kaling sounds less like someone chasing a plan and more like someone who’s made peace with the life that actually showed up. “Those things could happen,” she said of the milestones she once mapped out for herself, “but I think I don’t necessarily need them anymore, maybe — which is a nice feeling.”