Kristin Davis opens up about the perils of 'aging' in the public eye

Hollywood actress Kristin Davis called aging in the limelight 'extremely stressful' at times.

The Sex and the City star told NewBeauty in a new interview that "it can also be extremely stressful to be aging and to be compared to your much, much, much younger self."

"If I was from a regular life, I would feel fine; I would feel great! I'm healthy, I'm strong, I've got this little 3-year-old son, and I carry him around and it's all good—but, no, I'm on television, where every bit of my physical being is analyzed," continued Davis, who is mom to kids Wilson and Gemma.

"That part was always very stressful and difficult for me, because, as much as I can look back on my life and think, 'Oh, I looked great then,' you never think that at the time. I guess no one does."

With Sex and the City first releasing in 1998, Davis said she "became famous when magazines were king, and every week there'd be an article saying I was 'pear-shaped.'"

"That was difficult," she said, "and no amount of working out could change my shape or how those articles were written…they just loved to compare me to Sarah Jessica, who, at the same time, no matter what she did, was always going to be a very tiny thing."

For Davis, one incident in particular sticks out all these years later. Stopping on her way home from set to buy a bag of M&M's, the woman behind the register said, "'I can't sell these to you.'"

Initially, Davis assumed the woman was joking. "I thought she was going to say she was kidding, but she didn't," she told NewBeauty, "so I left that bodega and went to the next bodega down the block, and I bought four big bags of M&M's and I ate them all. It was just very stressful back in the day…we had the extreme body stress, but now we have the age stress. Both were, and are, very hard things to deal with."