Hoda Kotb once faced workplace body-shaming. Now, she’s opening up about it.
Though Hoda is leaving The Today Show, she still has time to drop some hard facts.
On the Monday, December 2 episode of the talk show, the TV news legend opened up to her co-host about a former boss.
The unnamed individual body-shamed Hoda, suggesting that she use a “treadmill.”
Why did someone body-shame Hoda Kotb?
On Monday’s episode of Today with Hoda and Jenna, titular hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager discussed how actor Timothee Chalamet’s career saw numerous delays over his body type.
Timmy, as his fans and admirers sometimes affectionately call him, has a slender body. Over the past dozen years, film and television have focused upon hypermuscular builds.
Some blame this on superhero films, but it extends to seemingly every genre. Too many networks and studios acting as if other body types, even traditionally attractive ones, are not worth showcasing. And yes, actors like Timothee have lost out on roles, while beefier actors transformed their bodies forever even for simple recurring TV roles.
This topic is how Hoda Kotb brought up that she, too, once had someone telling her that she was “not right for” her own job.
“I still remember I had just started working at a small market,” she recalled. “And I played basketball in high school, so I always assumed I was in shape even though literally after college and stuff, I wasn’t.”
Hoda shared: “I still remember my boss going to me, ‘Hey, Hoda,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah?’ He goes, ‘Hey, I got an idea — maybe you might wanna try to get on the treadmill.’”
Like the rest of us, Jenna expressed shock at the body-shaming of Hoda
“No!” Jenna Bush Hager exclaimed.
“Yeah,” Hoda acknowledged. “He said it like that, and I go, ‘What?’ Like, you know when you have a perception of yourself that is not the perception in the real world?”
Jenna chimed in that the guy must have had “reverse body dysmorphia.” Body dysmorphia is when someone has a distorted image of their own body. Jenna’s suggestion was that this boss was experiencing a sort of by-proxy version, where he had a warped view of other bodies.
“Yeah, so I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Hoda narrated. “But, if you don’t fit, they want you to wear something a certain way, cut your hair a certain way, speak a certain way.”
Though dialect is not the same as body-shaming, Jenna admitted that she had also been asked to avoid saying “y’all,” a folksy contraction of “you” and “all” most prevalent in the southern United States, when she began on Today.
However, she dropped the affect, admitting that she could not “pretend” to be a “serious news person.” Even if many of her colleagues are, in fact, very serious news people. Journalists, one might even call them.
‘You start losing who you are’
Hoda clearly understood Jenna’s decision to speak in a manner that feels natural to her.
“I think you know when you’re pretending deep down and no matter what it is, you start losing who you are,” she wisely opined.
Though Hoda did allow that there are “sometimes” areas where people have to change to “fit into a work environment.”
To be clear, there’s no indication that Hoda was describing anyone at NBC. In fact, she has only worked for NBC for the past 26 years.
After her Virginia Tech graduation in 1986, Hoda Kotb worked at a local CBS affiliate in Mississippi. The ’80s were, believe it or not, an even crueler time to be a woman in many ways than the 2020s are. Even if American women arguably had more rights when Hoda graduated college than they do now.
Whether the workplace body-shaming that she describes took place there or elsewhere is anyone’s guess.