Zareen Khan weighed over 100kg in college: ‘I only faced body-shaming when I entered the film industry’

Actor Zareen Khan has revealed that she faced fat-shaming in the film industry after she started acting. She also said that she was never bullied for her weight prior to that, even when she weighed more than 100kg when in college.

Zareen made her debut with Salman Khan’s Veer in 2010 and has since worked in films such as Ready, Housefull 2, and 1921.

Opening up about being body-shamed, Zareen told a Hindi daily, “The fact is, that I weighed more than 100kg when I was in school and college. But no one dared say anything to me. Whenever I heard that someone is fat and is being bullied, I used to think how can that be? ‘Itna bada shareer hai, do laga ke do (With the huge body, just give it back to them’). I have always been like this so I was never bullied. I only faced body-shaming when I entered the film industry. I could not understand. I thought ‘I did not face this when I was more than 100kg, and now that I am half the weight, they call me fat!'”

She added, “It was weird, but did not affect me. I am an actor, judge me on my acting abilities, not my weight, colour, or height. But there are people in the film industry who go all out to say that body-shaming should not be done. However, when they make a film, they only want zero-sized girls for their movie. There is a lot of show-offs and double standard in our industry.”

Zareen was often compared with Katrina Kaif at the time of the release of her debut, Veer. She talked about the comparisons and being body-shamed, in an interview this year.

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It was a very confusing phase for me because for Veer, I had to put on weight. The makers had asked me to put on weight because I was playing an 18th-century queen and they wanted to keep it authentic. That did not go down well, and I was fat-shamed. I was called ‘Fatrina’,” she told a leading daily in February.