Hilary Duff Exposes The Truth Behind Her Nude Cover Shoot

Hilary Duff is proud of her body — but she’s also keeping it real.

The “How I Met Your Father” star posed nude for the May/June cover of Women’s Health . In the accompanying profile, she emphasizes that the photos of her that appear in the magazine definitely benefited from some professional attention. (You can see the NSFW cover photo below.)

“I’m proud of my body. I’m proud that it’s produced three children for me,” Duff said. “I’ve gotten to a place of being peaceful with the changes my body has gone through. I also want people to know a makeup artist was there putting glow all over my body and someone put me in the most flattering position.”

Duff — who is mom to a son, Luca, 10, and daughters Banks, 3, and Mae, 13 months — spoke to Women’s Health about accepting her body, which she says wasn’t always easy.

The “Lizzie McGuire” star says she spent years feeling consumed by the “horrifying” pressure to be a certain size as a young woman on TV, which resulted in her developing an eating disorder at 17. Duff told the magazine that she sometimes still has difficulty separating health from appearance.

“Because of my career path, I can’t help but be like, ‘I am on camera and actresses are skinny,’” she said, reflecting how she felt when she signed on to do “How I Met Your Father” when she was eight months pregnant.

But she said she was able to deal with that concern, because she has been making peace with her body since the birth of her second child.

“I didn’t even know if I was going to have the opportunity to have another child [after the divorce],” said Duff, who split  from her first husband, Mike Comrie, in 2015, and married  Matthew Koma in 2019.

“So, being a mom again, maybe. It was a whole mix of things of being settled and realizing that I’m powerful and talented and smart,” she said. “All mental things.”

Although Duff cites this time period as the beginning of her journey toward self-acceptance, she did make some remarks  to Shape magazine in 2015 that suggest she was thinking along similar lines even then.

“There’s so much pressure to always have it together, and I’m not falling for it,” Duff said at the time. “You see supermodels who have babies, and the next week they look as if they were never pregnant. That was not the case with me. Some days I feel great, others I feel pretty normal, and that’s acceptable.”

To read Duff’s profile in full, head over to Women’s Health .

If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, call the National Eating Disorder Association hotline  at 1-800-931-2237.