Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis are making headlines this week as they make the talk-show rounds touting their new film Black Swan.
While our celebrity fitness profile usually gives you plenty of good tips on how to get into the best shape, this report is the exact opposite and should be heeded as a warning not to overdo it.
Preparation started a year before shooting and the training schedule was very demanding. Portman says she spent eight hours a day working on her ballet moves and choreography. She knew she had to drop 20 lb for the role, which for her slight frame of 5’ 3” is quite a lot of weight, and because she likes eating so much, she saved the weight loss to the end. Her weight loss was so startling that even Director Darren Aronofsky was alarmed and begged the star to eat something. He would fill up her trailer with food hampers in an attempt to get her to eat.
Kunis too dropped her weight down to 95 lb and couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror.
“I could see why this industry is so f–ked up, because at 95 pounds, I would literally look at myself in the mirror and I was like, Oh my God!” she says. “I had no shape, no boobs, no ass…All you saw was bone. I was like, This looks gross.”
Everyone was concerned about the stars’ drastic weight loss, including Kunis’ mom:
“My mom freaked out,” she says. “Everybody started panicking. She was like, ‘You have to promise me this isn’t going to affect you.’ I was like, ‘I promise it won’t, but it might take me a little time to be OK with having a little more fat on me.’ ”
We all know that the camera puts on 10 lb, so what looks horrifying in real life shows up on film and in photos as being more beautiful, which is something women everywhere need to understand – the images that we see in magazines and on film fall into the category of art not real life. Feeling good and looking good should be more about health and less about dress size.
“In real life, it looked disgusting,” Kunis says. “But in photographs and on film, it looked amazing.”
Both stars experienced the gruelling demands of being a ballet dancer not just with dropping the weight but with an intense training schedule.
“I am training for a ballet movie, which is a thousand times worse than anything that I’ve ever done. I’ve been doing that for five months, and that has been the most physically strenuous thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” says Kunis.
Portman suffered a dislocated rib and Kunis a dislocated shoulder. Truly what these two stars underwent is just a capsule of what it is really like to be a ballet dancer.
Both stars are back to their healthy weight now and loving the fact that they can relax and eat again.
“Man,” Kunis says, “it took me five months to lose 20 pounds, but it took me just five days—days!—to gain it all back.”
Source: E! Online
