Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘fat’ double from ‘Shallow Hal’: I almost starved to death

nypost.com:

Amelia Tait for her newsletter The Waiting Room.“It was so exciting. It was just fun to be part of a movie – there are so few people who actually get to do that.” Paltrow was “really nice” and Black “a delightful person,” and the starlet finally felt noticed for her persona — ironically, the plot line of the film — after fighting “really hard to be seen as a personality and not just my size.”But the film’s seemingly progressive storyline – that the “obese” character wasn’t a “villain,” but rather a “cool,” “popular” girl — instead welcomed an onslaught of body-shamers who zeroed in on Snitzer’s weight.It was then that Snitzer’s taste of the limelight soured.

Strangers on the street expressed their outrage, others claimed she was promoting obesity — and one person even went so far as to mail her diet pills.“I got really scared,” she said. “I was, like: Maybe I’m done with the concept of fame, maybe I don’t want to be an actor.

Maybe I’ll do something else.”She trekked back to New York and moved in with her parents, juggling various jobs — bartender, cater waiter, comedian — and while casting directors offered her roles, they were “mean,” she recalled.It was the opposite of why the burgeoning starlet ventured to Hollywood in the first place: “I just want to make people laugh; I don’t want to make people sad.”Life after her short-lived stardom was not all glitz and glamour — less than two years after the movie’s release, she nearly died due to weight loss.She was “technically starving to death” after a gastric band surgery had gone wrong.

Coupled with excessive exercise and slipping back into disordered eating habits inherited from her youth, Snitzer’s band slipped and she “got a torsion,” a potentially fatal stomach.