Kelly Stafford doesn’t shy away from talking about her body. The wife of NFL quarterback Matthew Stafford looked back on her time as a cheerleader at the University of Georgia and criticized her own relationship with food and how her coach made her feel about herself.
“I always tried to be small,” she said on the Thursday, June 19 episode of her “The Morning After” podcast. “I had a horrible relationship with food ever since cheering at Georgia because my coach made me feel like I was 500 pounds.”
Stafford, 36, then shuddered, thinking about that time in her life, before cracking a joke.
“I will say, though, you look back at those pictures and — not me, I don’t feel like I looked big — but the guy holding me up was really struggling,” she said. “All of his veins are, like, popping out of his face, he’s holding his breath, I was like, ‘damn.’”
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Kelly met Matthew, 37, during their time together in Athens while Matthew was an All-American for the Bulldogs’ football team. The two married in 2015 and share twin daughters, Sawyer and Chandler, 8, as well as daughters Hunter, 6, and Tyler, 4.
“I feel like I got to let that go a little bit and understand I don’t need to be a certain size,” Kelly continued. “I just need to be happy and comfortable.”
Her struggles persisted after college. She recalled the 2021 football season, Matthew’s first with the Rams, when the team won the Super Bowl.
“I was about two pounds,” she said. “That year, moving to L.A., the pressure that was on him, I couldn’t eat. He could eat fine. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, honestly that was a really hard year for me. And you could tell.”
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“This has been since I was 17. Since I was a freshman at Georgia,” she added. “I am finally comfortable being like, ‘you know what? Why am I gonna kill myself to be that size?’”
It took time for her to figure out what look she likes best (and which look her husband prefers).
“I like what I look like with a little bit of thickness down there,” she said. “I know my husband likes that.”
Kelly has opened up about Matthew’s posterior proclivity before. In a May episode of her podcast, her cohost Hank Winchester asked if she knew what it was that initially attracted Matthew to her. She was well aware that it was, as she put it, “my ass.”
“I am very aware of that,” she said at the time. “That’s why I’m constantly in the gym right now to make sure the booty amongst everything else looks better. All I do is legs and ass. That’s it. That’s all I can do.”
