Cara Lynn Shultz
·4 min read
The ‘Boy Meets World’ alum shares a diary entry from a time where “if you had curves" you were "supposed to feel bad"
Boy Meets World star Danielle Fishel shared a diary entry she wrote as a teen when a friend commented on her weight gain
The actress, who read the entry on Pod Meets World, which she cohosts with her costars from the sitcom, said it was "very sad" and shows how in the nineties, "There was no such thing as body positivity"
Fishel wrote that "I will never eat again," but did go back later to amend the diary entry and add that she hadn't stopped eating and was just "venting"
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Danielle Fishel shared a journal entry from her teen years — and admitted that while “I'm gonna read it very funny,” the entry, about the way she felt about her body, was ”very sad.”
On a new episode of Pod Meets World, the podcast she co-hosts with her Boy Meets World costars Will Friedle and Rider Strong, Fishel shared a diary entry she wrote after a friend commented that she’d gained weight.
“It really will give you a real peek into the mind of teenage Danielle in the nineties, but I know I'm not alone,” Fishel, who starred on the ABC hit from 1993 until 2000, said.
“The nineties in general were a time where, you know, there was really no such thing as body positivity. Everyone was chasing a waif look. And if you had curves or if you had any sort of extra weight, it was really something you were supposed to feel bad about.”
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Unlike her friends, who “could all eat whatever they wanted,” Fishel, now 43, said, “I have always been the type [where] I gain weight relatively quickly and but I gain it evenly. I have a soft plumpness everywhere.”
Because of this, she says in high school she “watched her weight” while her friends, who were cheerleaders and “significantly more active than I was” would eat lunches that included “a big, thick slice of pizza and a bag of chips.”
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“If I had a piece of pizza every day for lunch and a bag of chips, I would definitely have weight on me,” she said.
It was one of her cheerleader friends, Jen, who made the comment that prompted the journal entry.
“I'm going to read it funny. You'll just have to hear the sadness within it,” she said.
“ ‘Today, I found something I've dreaded hearing,” she read, with dramatic inflection. “ ‘I have never been so hurt in my life.' ”
“ 'I found out Jen, my best friend next to Jess, said that the other day when she saw me, it looked like I had gained weight. I wanted to cry … I really hated Jen then.' “
But Fishel said that, instead of confronting her friend, her reaction was to write, “' Maybe I will never eat again.' ”
Friedle and Strong reacted strongly, saying, “Oh no,” prompting Fishel to reply, “If you don't think I could go up a notch, you're wrong.”
“ ‘Then I'll die,’ “ she wrote. “ ‘And that'll show her.’ “
“It’s like imagining your own funeral,” Friedle said.
“And it’ll be such a skinny little casket,” Fishel retorted.
She shared that she later went back to her diary and added a footnote that “I was angry there. By the way, I’m eating.”
“I apparently read it a while later, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ ”
“I was venting, which is a great point of a diary to just vent,” Fishel said, adding, “By the way, Jen is still my best friend. She’s stillso thin. But now she works at it.”
Fishel also shared that she looks back at her years on Boy Meets World — particularly how she was perceived during earlier seasons — and was surprised that fans liked her when she had "more weight."
"I would see comments people had made about me when I was on Boy Meets World when I did have more weight on me than I did in the first couple of seasons," she said. "And I found that there were plenty of people who were like, 'I think Topanga looked better with more weight on her .' "
"And I was like, 'No! That's that's the first time I'm hearing of that.' "
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