When she was 20, acting student and aspiring comedian Ivy Snitzer responded to a casting call in LA after hearing only a vague description from a friend in her improv class. By the next day she was cast as Gwyneth Paltrow’s body double in Shallow Hal. Ivy said yes because she thought it would be exciting and help develop her comedic chops. Two decades later and Ivy is no longer acting or writing jokes, and she’s lost a significant amount of weight. Writer Amelia Tait at Tiny Letter spoke with Ivy about her life in the interim years:
Ivy Snitzer, who appeared as Gwyneth Paltrow’s body double in Shallow Hal (2001), is telling her story.
At 20, Snitzer was an aspiring actress and jumped at the opportunity to stand in for Paltrow, who played the character Rosemary and performed many scenes in a fat suit. At the time, Snitzer felt that her work in the movie mattered and would even offer a progressive outlook on early 2000s body standards. “At that point, if you saw someone obese in a movie, they were a villain,” she said in a recent interview with Amelia Tait.
It would take decades for Shallow Hal to be critiqued properly (as The Atlantic put it in 2021: “Shallow Hal is bad because it treats Rosemary’s body as comedy. But it is insidious because it treats her body as tragedy”) and within that time, Snitzer, now 42 and working as an insurance agency owner in Philadelphia, has had time to reflect on the movie—and also how it personally affected her.
Notably, only 15 months after Shallow Hal came out, in November 2001, Snitzer had lap band surgery.
She told Tait that she thought the surgery was a “fantastic” idea. “Something that’ll fix [my weight],” she said. While she didn’t think she minded it herself, she revealed that it seemed to be her job, as a “good fattie,” to strive to be thinner.
“If you’re fat, you’re supposed to try to not be,” Snitzer said. “I hated my body, the way I was supposed to. I ate a lot of salads. I had eating disorders that I was very proud of.”
In fact, she probably didn’t think of them as eating disorders, but as doctor’s orders.
Snitzer’s physician had told her that she wouldn’t make it to 40 years old if she didn’t go through with the lap band surgery. Once she had undergone the procedure, she became serious about losing weight as fast as possible. The surgery itself reduced the size of her stomach and restricted what she could eat, but she put in extra effort to be thin by excessively exercising, purging and further restricting her calorie intake.
“It didn’t occur to me that I was supposed to be ashamed of those behaviors, like a lot of people are,” she said. “For me, I was supposed to be proud of them”—because they were her means to an idealized figure.
[From Tiny Letter via Yahoo! Life]
Not mentioned in Yahoo’s article is that shortly after Ivy had the lap band surgery, the band slipped and she got a torsion. For three months she was on an IV and liquid diet until health insurance kicked in from a new job, and she ultimately had a gastric bypass. I think that’s pretty vital info to bear in mind, and Yahoo was a little careless in omitting it in their description of how she lost weight after the surgery. It makes this excerpt even more devastating:
At her sickest and her smallest, “everything was different” from when she was in a bigger body, Snitzer said. “It was really nice to be treated well.”
I mean, that says it all about our culture. Thankfully, there has been progress. I’m still struck by the diversity of models when I shop online at Target. The range of body types is honestly something I never thought I would see in the mainstream marketplace. That being said, we’re still being held to impossible standards—as Barbie reminds us! I only hope that the strides we’re making in mental health awareness come together with our expanding acceptance of all shapes and sizes. We need to break free from being ashamed. Except for (Shallow Hal directors) Bobby and Peter Farrelly. They can spend some more time feeling ashamed.
photos via Instagram and Facebook and credit Getty
I like the new diversity in ads too. IMO, what would be optimal is if you could sort the clothes on websites by your frame/body type. That means they would need pictures for thin and heavier frames for all/ most items. It’s really difficult to tell if done will be flattering unless it’s on a model with a similar frame. I know this will not happen soon though. It would probably be really expensive.
Old Navy shows the same outfits in different model sizes and I love it.
They do, and it’s nice to see them in different sizes, but they got rid of the plus size section to be inclusive and now as a plus size woman, I have to weed through outfits that only come up to XL since they don’t separate them. I am not insulted by a separate section for plus sizes.
Wow this article hit me hard. Thank you Kismet – beautifully written! I also hope that we’re getting better in this area, but from the comments I’ve seen on other stories, we still have a long ways to go.
We’ve come so far, for sure. But we still have a long way to go. Nearly every mega-successful Hollywood actress is still much thinner and fitter than the average woman. Women are still subjected to a constant barrage of commentary and advertisements about how to eat and when to eat and what to eat and which diet pills to take. Celebs still tell us they’re hungry all the time or they exercise for two hours a day because apparently what they look like is just as important — if not more so — as their acting abilities. The rest of us still compare ourselves to these unrealistic “ideals” and, at worst, believe that we just aren’t as good as the people touting them, because we don’t have the willpower/strength/work-ethic to follow a severe calorie deficit or get up at 4:00 am everyday to work out.
My best friend went through the surgery in question – and lost a lot of weight. I wish I can say she is happy. She seems lost and confused and hurt by realizing how the society really did treat her so unfairly just because of her weight before. And now… her body is slim, but her eyes are completely empty.
That’s heartbreaking. I never got so many compliments as when I was dealing with severe depression and dropped a huge amount of weight in a short period of time. Society is screwed up.
I have two friends who got lap bands. Well, I have one of them still. She says it’s made her pretty miserable. She can’t eat much, has reflux, and just generally doesn’t feel good most of the time. The other one lost her life not long after to a bad combination of medications which someone really should have caught. NOT worth it!
Then there’s getting expensive injections to basically give yourself anorexia.
The weight loss industrial complex is still a trap, and it’s just as strong as ever. I don’t see it slowing down any time soon.
At least there are companies like Torrid and EShakti where we can get clothes that fit.
And yes, Gwyneth, and the producers and the directors should all be ashamed of themselves. That movie was gross when it came out and it still is.
I’ve been through this in reverse. Severe digestive issues led me to lose massive amount of weight in middle school. I remained thin – sometimes painfully so – into my early 20s.
I was generally praised for my “great figure.” People told me they envied me. I told them they wouldn’t if they knew the reason for it.
Fast forward 15 years, PCOS leads to weight gain in my thirties that I am trying to get under control.
It’s been eye opening to see how much better I was treated when I was thin. Even when I was underweight, yes, there was sometimes annoying concern, but people were rarely cruel. Once you gain weight, however, that “concern” generally takes the form of judgment and assumptions. Some of them very cruel.
It is eye opening isn’t it, Dawn? I am overweight and going through the process to get gastric bypass surgery. I am tired of not mattering .. being treated like I don’t exist. Just for one day I would love to be thin to see if people hold the door open for me or care about what I have to say about things or treat me with respect instead of judgement.
I don’t think you could make a Shsllow Hal style movie, at least not as a comedy now. It was a horrible premise then, and back in the waif thin era it was criticized for fat phobia. As long as you “look” thin and healthy, people don’t care about eating disorders, but if you’re visibly fat, it’s all concern about your health and how you’ll die young. While I am currently trying to lose weight, I generally don’t talk about it because you’re judged for wanting to lose weight, but scolded for not losing weight. I did a so-called cleanse a few months ago and a relative praised me for being so disciplined , not of course I didn’t eat solid food for 5 days, was super cranky and light headed, and felt like crap. It’s really hard and you’re hard on yourself. There is more body diversity in media now but thinness is still considered a virtue. Anyway, hope she’s still getting residuals from the film.
Man, I feel you! I remember all the compliments I got when I had an eating disorder, was losing my hair, lost my period, and was a vicious cow to everyone close to me, because I *finally* had a body that was slim-ish.
All the comments on how healthy I looked when I was the sickest and angriest and most mentally unwell I had ever been were a real mindf*ck.
And the anger Laalaa mentioned re the disparity in how the world treats you when they deem you “acceptable” is so real! And it’s even harder once you inevitably gain all the weight back because no one can live like that forever. It’s why I get so furious every time a commenter here says something along the lines of “oh I don’t care about body size, I just care that she is *healthy*”. Bullsh*t. You have internalized fat phobia and are refusing to take a good hard look at yourself and see how you are contributing to the problem.
/end rant
I have a coworker who has had both Lap Band and Gastric Sleeve surgeries.
She had Lap band more than a decade ago, it slipped, and she almost died, and had it removed.
about 5 years ago, after she gained her weight back, she had the gastric sleeve procedure.
She lives daily with extreme acid reflux, that she manages with medication but also worries about everything sh puts into her mouth every meal every day., along with a host of other health issues. weight loss surgery options are not the holy grail that the medical communit makes them out to be, and come along with a life time of issues that need to be navigated.
I had the gastric sleeve surgery. I loved my results but years later, I gained a lot of the weight back. My brain still tells me that the worst thing I have done in my life is to gain weight. It is a constant struggle.
Another note is that this is the surgery that Lisa Marie Presley had and she DIED from complications years later. I’m lucky that all I did was gain more weight.
A coworker had this done. She lost weight and gained a lot back. She’s told me that she feels like a failure and a disappointment. Her mom paid for her surgery and I think she contributes to my friend’s feelings. ☹️
The medial community has so much to answer for surrounding weight bias. The amount of damage that continues to be done to our culture’s mental and physical health around weight stigma is truly horrific. My husband just had back surgery. He had a ruptured disc and was in extreme pain. The surgeon straight up told him he’s lucky he isn’t too overweight because he would have refused to do the surgery. This was not because it wouldn’t be possible to do the surgery, but because it was a little more difficult for the surgeon. Fuck a fat person’s quality of life, I guess. Not to mention it would be difficult to even get a diagnosis for this issue because you need an MRI and the machines don’t accommodate all body types.
As a kid, I was sickly thin, and didn’t start putting on any “extra pounds” until university. I got a mix of disdain, disgust, and envy for being so thin. The main reason I was so thin is because I had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder that made me feel sick all of the time, and therefore eating was not easy for me to do. I always felt embarrassed about how skinny and I was, and was so jealous of girls with curves, especially in middle school.
My weight has fluctuated since then, from quite thin to bigger than I’ve ever been (not counting pregnancy and post-partum weight.), due to a variety of factors including anxiety/appetite. I look in the mirror and tell myself that I would have killed for these curves when I was 16. But do I like them now? It’s such an irony to wish that I looked like I did when I was going through some of the most stressful/painful/difficult times of my life.
The problem is that extreme thinness is the norm we see everywhere around us. I think it’s great that we have more inclusive sized models on old navy etc. I think that things like that go along way to normalizing different body types. However, we are consuming more visual media than we ever have in the history of humanity. The vast majority of images marketed as ideal just are not diverse or inclusive.
It’s not easy to navigate.