Having a large social media following is a blessing and curse — though luckily it’s mostly the former for Mandy Moore.
The This Is Us star fills her 3.3 million Instagram followers in on her daily life on set and through all of her travels — and happily counts on them for advice on everything from gluten-free treats (she recently learned she has a severe gluten sensitivity) to the best manicure in Philadelphia.
“Instagram is a great community in that sense,” Moore, 34, tells PEOPLE. “The other day I was like, hey Philly folks! I need a place to get a manicure and eat and people just pour in with great suggestions and I feel like it was the same with the gluten-free thing. I was like, point me in the right direction with food and cookbooks and meals that you like, and everyone was really great to jump in on the bandwagon and help me out.”
But other times, social media ends up being a place of criticism, like when she was accused of editing down her waist in a picture, or when people thought she had a nose job. Still, Moore doesn’t “lose sleep about that.”
“It’s not something that I spend any amount of time thinking about,” she says. “You address it head-on and then you move on to the next thing. It’s like, ‘Nope! I didn’t do that.’ And moving on to the next thing. Something more important is going on in the world.”
And Moore says people should do whatever they want — plastic surgery or photoshop included — if it makes them happy.
“I don’t see what the big deal would be anyway. It’s like, whatever someone does to make themselves feel better; I don’t pass any judgement,” she says. “But I’m also fine to be truthful and set people straight.”
That judgement-free attitude extends to how she feels about her body itself. Moore says she managed to avoid any major body image issues, even as a teenager growing up in the music industry
“I’ve looked different ways and I went through puberty I guess as a young person in the public eye,” she says. “But I’ve always felt pretty comfortable in my skin and people always let me be myself.”
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These days, Moore, who partnered with vitamin company Nature’s Way for their 50th birthday, feels like she’s very conscious and understanding of her body. To her, wellness “means listening to my body.”
“It means paying attention to, on any given day that things might feel a little bit differently. That I might have different needs. That life and stress might affect me one way on any given day and completely differently on the next. So I try to be cognizant of having some kind of guidelines of how I build wellness into my daily schedule,” she says.
Moore makes sure to get enough sleep, drink plenty of water and take her vitamins each day. And when she needs a little more self-care, she’ll “disconnect from the world.”
“I just put my phone away, put on a record, take a bath, make a cup of tea, go out and have dinner with friends. It kind of varies,” she says. “I think I’m pretty good at knowing my limit and when I need to take a step back and a deep breath and figure out how to put one foot in front of the other.”
Moore also works out when she can and goes to cycling classes or works with personal trainer. But her main love is hiking, and in the last year she summited Mt. Kilimanjaro and went all over Chile during her honeymoon with husband Taylor Goldsmith.
“I’ve always been a hiker — I lived near Griffith Park in Los Angeles for almost 15 years, so it was just in my backyard, practically. But I always wanted to climb Kilimanjaro and that’s what sort of solidified my love of being outside and realizing that I can tackle something that was seemingly impossible,” she says. “I’d never camped before, so the idea of being outside for a week, not showering — all these new experiences — I sort of proved to myself that I was capable of more than I was giving myself credit for.”
Now Moore is itching to hit the trails again.
“It definitely ignited this love and now I’m wondering what I can climb next,” she says. “I’m about to be on my hiatus [from filming] and I’m like, I want to do Fuji, I want to do Reiner, I want to do Baker, I want to do Everest Base Camp. I have big hiking plans.”
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