Woman We Love: Lauren Conrad – Beyond the Hills

I never watched Laguna Beach or The Hills, but I always perceived their blonde reality stars (think Kristin Cavallari, Heidi Montag, and Spencer Pratt) as simply more fodder for the tabloids with nothing all that special to offer besides pretty faces. However, after reading the September issue of Shape, I am a fan of Lauren Conrad. She is someone who has taken her reality roots and is using her newfound celebrity power for good, rather than as a tool for self promotion and greed.
Sure, she has two fashion lines and a novel, which are promoted in the magazine, and she’s making money from them. She’s a business woman! I’m not going to hold that against her. In fact, I’m going to applaud her for it because she’s used her reality platform to start a legitimate business doing what she loves at age 23, which isn’t just posing for the camera. That’s just smart, not greedy. So she’s used her celebrity power for herself, to improve her life and get herself where she wants to be, and in the process, she’s using her celebrity power to promote a down-to-earth approach to health and beauty that is completely admirable and attainable.
Being super-skinny is not her goal because she believes in eating healthy without depriving yourself. She’s no longer a calorie counter because she’s realized that it’s not about the calories. It’s about the food. You could easily eat just 1,200 calories a day in cookies, but if you’re still eating crap (i.e., cookies), you’ll feel like crap instead of feeling beautiful! Lauren noticed that when she switched her focus from calorie counting to flexible yet healthy eating, she actually stopped craving crap food like most pizza and burgers. Does this mean she never eats pizza? No! She just eats healthier pizza like the salad pizza from California Pizza Kitchen (which is awesome by the way) instead of Papa John’s. She also has an approachable exercise plan that doesn’t necessarily involve going to the gym. Sure she had a personal trainer design it for her, but she shares the paid-for secrets in the article. She has an anytime-anywhere set of exercises and engages in fun outdoor activities (think tennis, bike rides, and hiking). You don’t have to do 100 reps of everything like Madonna just to be fit, and Lauren seems to understand this and not feel pressured by those who don’t.
She has also realized that one of the oldest clichés is completely true: “You’ve got to stay true to yourself. It’s the only way you’ll be really happy.” She says that once she realized that what other people said about her was only affecting her life because she was stressing about it, she was able to let it go and be herself. We could all take a cue from the former Hills star on this one.
Lauren Conrad has left The Hills, abandoning “reality” for reality. And unlike her former costar Heidi Montag, who has maintained her fame by getting married, buying $10,000 worth of guns and ammo, posing for Playboy, and lip-synching, Lauren has maintained her fame by starting a business doing what she loves, creating an affordable line of clothes for Kohl’s so “everybody can dress like a star” and by being a good role model for a beautiful life from the inside out.
This is why Lauren Conrad is a woman we love.
credit - NuNu Femme