'I'm a hog at heart': Dolly Parton opens up about maintaining her famous figure

Dolly Parton is showing no signs of slowing down.

Featured on the cover of this week’s PEOPLE magazine, the 72-year-old music icon is hard at work promoting the upcoming Netflix film “Dumplin'” starring Jennifer Aniston.

The film is based on the novel of the same name about an overweight teenage girl who idolizes Parton and features six new songs written by the country legend.

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“I’m a hog at heart,” Parton said “I’ve been up and down with my weight through the years so I can definitely relate to that.”

Parton hopes the film will inspire other women to learn to love themselves, no matter what people say.

“[This movie] shows that you don’t have to be physically beautiful. You don’t have to look like a supermodel,” she told the magazine. “I really worry a lot about young girls today because they think they have to look like the models or the people on television. We need to be accepting of ourselves in how we are.”

Although her weight has fluctuated in the past, Parton says she mostly sticks to a “low carb diet.” Still, the “Jolene” singer says she likes to treat herself to some of her favourite Southern comfort foods on the weekend.

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“I’ll make gravy and biscuits and fried sausage or fried spam. My husband loves my cooking, so I cook for him,” the singer said about her husband of 52 years, Carl Thomas Dean. “I really just cook old Southern food.”

Parton said that whenever she becomes nostalgic or misses her “Mama” Avie Lee who died in 2003, she turns to cooking up some of her favourite dishes from her days growing up in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

“If I think of Mama, then I usually cook what she used to cook that we loved so good,” she said. “Mama used to make, it’s like chocolate pudding, really, but you put it in the skillet with flour and sugar and milk and you just make a hot pudding. Mama used to put it with biscuits. Mama’s gone now, but she’s not gone in our memory and in our cooking.”

Looking back on her illustrious career, Parton said she’s proud of the impact she’s had on her fans, and says she always wanted to do “something to touch people.”

“I wanted to uplift mankind and glorify God,” she said. “It’s very touching to me to see that something I’ve done has been an inspiration.”

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