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Tracee Ellis Ross: “I Didn’t Like Myself Growing Up”

(Photo credit: Tracee Ellis Ross facebook)

You can’t deny that actress Tracee Ellis Ross comes from good genes. Her mom is the beautiful and graceful Diana Ross. Her aunt is an award-winning doctor. Her family is beautiful, period. But even with all of that, as she grew up, Tracee didn’t like to look at herself in the mirror.

There was one particular part of her body she hated, but now has a greater appreciation for — her butt.

Black-ish‘s Tracee Ellis Ross says that her body image has completely changed as she’s grown older, especially when it comes to her posterior.

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“I love my butt in a way I didn’t growing up,” the Golden Globe winner, 44, tells Health for their April cover. “I really didn’t like it growing up. It was so much bigger than everyone else’s, and I wanted jeans to look the way they did on everyone else, and mine didn’t.”

“I’ve been — to a certain extent — at odds with my body for many years, wanting it to be something other than it was, wanting myself to be something other than I was.”

Back in 2015, Ross said that, “One minute we’re supposed to be flat-chested, the next we’re supposed to have big butts. Who the f–k can keep up?” In the same issue of Glamour she went on to say, “…It teaches us to be so focused on achieving the standards other people set that we have no time left to put toward giving ourselves the life we want.”

(Photo Credit: Tracee Ellis Ross Instagram)

The black-ish star admitted that she sometimes felt more than a little self-conscious about her body.

“I always had a thin frame, but when you hit 40 and eat french fries three days in a row, it’s like, ‘What happened?,’ ” she says in the issue. “There are things about my body that I don’t love, but I’m not trying to look perfect every day – I’m trying to look like me!”

It’s that newfound love for her body that shows every time she goes on the red carpet or does an interview. The nervous, self-conscious Tracee is gone. The “beautiful-inside-and-out (and she knows it) Tracee” is here now!

“The comfort in my skin is so much better,” she says. “I spent so much of my life, culturally, seeing myself through others because I just didn’t always have the confidence to look at the world through my own eyes.”


Now Ross does two important things for her body: “One, talk nice to it. And two, find workouts that make me feel good.”

(Photo credit: Tracee Ellis Ross Instagram)

And that includes treating herself to a few vices: “French fries, olives, shopping.”

You can see more of Tracee and her “assets” every Wednesday night on black-ish.

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