[sociable/]Jessica Simpson is famously being paid a reported $4million to be the face of Weight Watchers.

And the new mother, who gave birth to daughter Maxwell Drew Johnson on May 1, has just revealed her weight loss so far… an impressive 40lbs.

The actress once famous for her Daisy Dukes still says she has a way to go yet however after hitting more than 170lbs while pregnant.

Speaking earlier to USA Today, the actress explained her weight gain.

She said: “I let myself indulge in everything I wanted because it was the first time I was ever pregnant, and I wanted to enjoy it.

“I didn’t know [the weight] didn’t all come off with the baby.”

Signing up to Weight Watchers in order to shift the baby pounds, Jessica must have known it was going to be tough. Indeed, her very first advert for Weight Watchers, filmed just three months after giving birth, showed her only from the chest up because she was too uncomfortable for her full figure to be shown.

In the advert she says: “I’m Jessica Simpson and yes I’m doing Weight Watchers.

“There is a lot of pressure to lose weight but I’m not a supermodel. I’m just Jessica trying to eat real food in the real world and I really just wanna be healthy for my daughter.

“So I knew Weight Watchers was the only way to go. It’s working.

“I’m on my way and it feels amazing. Really I just wanna be a better version of myself.”

She has since worked hard to lose the weight and was proud to reveal her 40 pound loss – and her full figure – on Katie Couric’s new show this week. She does admit that it hasn’t been easy, however.

At one point, while trying to embark on an exercise regime, she had to admit that her ‘boobs are way too big to run at this point’.

Engaged to former NFL player Eric Johnson, the star said: “My body is not bouncing back like a supermodel.

“I’m just your everyday woman who is trying to feel good and be healthy for her daughter, her fiancé and herself.”

Now her new weight must surely be an inspiration to anyone looking to lose weight, however.

Not surprising considering she is following the Weight Watchers diet (and if rumours can be believed, is being paid handsomely for it too), Jessica credits the dieting giant for working for her.

She said: “You have to track every bit, and you can’t get away with the bites because they add up.

“You have to be completely honest with yourself, and I think just creating that relationship of honesty with yourself is so good.”

She is now just 10lbs away from her target weight and is still motivated and is including her daughter in the process.

She said: “I basically take her with me, whether it’s strapping her on me or strolling around the neighborhood.

“My new goal is 14,000 steps a day.”

She’s the best-selling female artist of all time, but she’s just like the rest of us when it comes to her weight.

Mariah Carey, who has had more number one singles than any other solo artist, had to work hard to lose her baby weight after the birth of her twins just like any other regular mum.

The 42-year-old superstar turned to Jenny Craig, now known only as Jenny, for help to lose the 30lbs she had gained after the birth of twins Monroe and Moroccan. One year later, she has gained her pre-pregnancy figure back and looks better than ever.

Here she shares her diet, exercise and weight loss secrets…

Mariah Carey on Losing Her Baby Weight

Mariah gave birth to twins Monroe and Moroccan just one year ago and admits she gained a lot of pregnancy pounds.

She joked: “I put on 70lbs but if you look at me in pictures you’d think it was more like 9,000lbs. A lot of it was water weight because I pretty much had head-to-toe oedema, which is very painful.

“Pregnancy was probably the best and the hardest thing I’ll ever go through. I know for a lot of women, it can be wonderful and relatively easy. But for me, it was like ‘Okay, honey, do you have to do everything the hard way?’

“Luckily, all the swelling went away fairly quickly after the babies were born.”

After that, she had 30lbs to lose in order to regain the toned figure she was famous for.

She added: “I have such empathy for people who need to lose a lot of weight. I’ve been there and I know what they are going through. I remember thinking at the time: ‘I’ll never look or feel the same again.”

Thankfully, she was wrong. She turned to Jenny Craig – now known as Jenny – and lost the 30lbs in nine months.

She said: “I’ve been on other diets before — my weight has fluctuated 15 to 20 pounds over the years. But I liked the structure of Jenny Craig and that I can prepare my own food along with eating the company’s meals and snacks.”

Mariah Carey’s Jenny Diet

Jenny has been in the diet arena for almost 30 years, originally beginning in Australia before moving to the States, the UK and five other countries after that.

The Jenny ethos is Eat Well.  Move More.  Live Life.

It operates on three fundamental principles of Mind, Food and Body. Each level is intended to teach you healthy weight loss and maintenance. Jenny offers one-on-one consultation designed to identify your unhealthy eating triggers, as well as a lifestyle plan and delivers ready-made pre-calorie counted meals to your door. It promises a sensible weight loss of one to two pounds per week.

Jenny has also recently introduced a new programme called Jenny-Set-Go, a four-week programme designed to help dieters change their unhealthy ways in just 28 days. For $15 plus the cost of food, it provides a structured menu and an online site for workout plans and recipes.

Mariah Carey on her Diet and Exercise Routine

Now fronting a new commercial for Jenny, Mariah credits the Jenny eating plan and an exercise routine for helping her to lose the weight and keep it off.

She said: “I used to be able to slim down just by exercising more, but that’s changed. Since having the babies, I realise that 90 per cent of losing weight is my diet.”

That’s not to say that she doesn’t work out, however, to keep her figure toned. In contrast to many other celebrities who spend practically all day at the gym, Mariah’s exercise regime is more attainable, with the majority of her emphasis on swimming.

She said: “Swimming is my favourite form of exercise, which is surprising since I almost drowned in the ocean when I was six. It was scary, but it didn’t traumatize me or deter me from going in again. My mother just put me back in the water and told me it would be fine. And it was.”

She told the Urban Daily: “Today my workout routine is more about getting and staying toned. And for me, that means either taking hour-long walks a few times a week or jumping in the pool three or four days a week to do 45 minutes of aquatic exercises.”

It certainly seems to have worked for her. She recently unveiled her new figure on the cover of Shape magazine, showing off impressive tight abdominal muscles in just a cropped top and white knickers. Most women would love to be so confident about their bodies after childbirth, or indeed, at any time, and Mariah has the right to be thrilled with her new body.

Mariah told OWN’s Rosie Show: “I’m proud of how hard I worked to get my body back. I had to do this for me.

“I feel better in every way. To me, it’s mind, body and soul. I was in a bad place physically during my pregnancy,” she also told USA Today.

Mariah Carey on the American Heart Association

Mariah’s relationship with Jenny focuses on more than just weight loss. She and Jenny are supporting the American Heart Association’s My Heart initiative, a health awareness project that is important to Mariah.

Mariah says: “I’m just here as a catalyst.  Ideally this will help create awareness – my goal is to at least make a difference.

“As an artist, I use my voice to entertain. But, today I want to use my voice to draw attention to a serious matter. Two-thirds of the country is placing themselves at risk for heart disease and diabetes. Largely, that is due to unhealthy eating patterns and lack of physical activity.

“I obtained a greater understanding of this when I was pregnant with my twins and dealing with my own health issues. That’s why I feel so strongly about working with Jenny and the American Heart Association to help Americans get serious about their health as it pertains to these issues which are so important.”

Mariah Carey Talks about Her Future

There’s no doubt that life is looking good for Mariah after getting her figure back and feeling confident once again.

She and her husband are looking after themselves and looking to the future.

Any fan of Mariah’s knows that her husband Nick Cannon had a well-publicised health scare with blood clots in his lungs and Mariah told Entertainment Tonight: “It was really frightening, but he’s feeling much stronger and is definitely on the right track. He’s taking better care of himself, eating a diet low in sodium and sugar, and getting more sleep.”

Now that both parents are feeling healthier, they can concentrate on their gorgeous twins Monroe and Moroccan. Mariah is also planning on going back to work as well.

She says: “I’ve started writing songs for a new album, which I hope will come out in 2012. Getting back in the studio and making music again — which I truly love doing — is the best way to end this crazy year.”

And for those who want to speculate about her current weight, take note that Mariah isn’t a slave to the weighing scales. In fact she ignores the scales altogether and judges instead by her dress size.

“Right now I am between a 4 or 6,” she says. And she deserves it. As she also notes, “I worked like a fiend.”

She’s always been known as the voluptuous Domestic Goddess but when Nigella Lawson’s weight started to balloon, she knew she had to do something. Now the sinful chef has slimmed down from a size 18 to a size 12 and is looking healthier and happier than ever. We know how she did it…

Nigella Lawson on her Pre-Weight Loss Figure

Ever since Nigella was pictured in what can only be described as a deeply unflattering swimming costume ‘burkini’ in Bondi Beach, it was obvious just how much weight the TV chef had put on. Cue all the jokes about her eating her own decadent cooking and speculation that she had chosen to cover up completely as an attempt to hide her growing frame.

For her part, Nigella admitted that she was less than thrilled with her new size and stressed that she didn’t want to be the ‘poster girl for the well-padded woman’.

Nigella has always been a healthy, curvy woman as opposed to a stick insect and that’s what the public love about her. She looks like a woman who could make you amazing food and would then sit down and enjoy it with you as well. Her famous hour glass figure has made many a man drool and many women envy her confidence and poise.

Of course, just like any other woman, she had fleeting moments where she worried about her figure too.

Nigella once said: “There are times when I want to lose weight. I suppose the difference is I don’t want to be as thin. Greed always outweighs my vanity.”

Speaking to the Sun newspaper, Nigella said before her latest weight battle: “Of course I have moments of doubt. All women have times thinking: ‘My God, I can’t go out, my hips are so big today!’

“But there’s a range we are comfortable within and I don’t like it when I go above that. I’ve got no desire to go below it. If I lose 40lb I would age ten years straight away. But that’s my excuse!”

She added: “Women find it very easy to persecute themselves over their weight and whenever I’ve said: ‘I ought to lose a bit of weight,’ I can guarantee I’ll put it on. I love food and I love cooking so therefore I never deprive myself.”

It was perhaps after seeing herself in that burkini, however, that she realized she had gone beyond her healthy weight range and had to do something about it. And do something she did, promptly losing approximately three stone.

Nigella Lawson’s Weight Loss Secrets

Nowadays when we see Nigella, she is slim and looks radiant, yet she has still managed to keep the killer curves that are her calling card. She is a whole world away from her burkini days; she no longer needs swathes of black fabric to cover up her body, and her hair and skin look healthy.

She seems to have lost the weight without a drastic unhealthy diet, so how did she do it?

While Nigella may have kept quiet on her diet success, her friends have credited it to the Bodyism Clean and Lean plan devised by nutritional adviser and personal trainer, James Duigan.

The Bodyism plan puts Nigella’s normal cream-laden cooking on the banned list. Instead the chef was encouraged to eat lean meat, fresh organic vegetables, egg white omelettes, salad, plenty of fish and skinless poultry. Puddings, once an admitted staple in Nigella’s diet, were replaced by nuts or fruit.

As well as eating healthily, Bodyism encourages dieters to take a cocktail of vitamins, fish oils and minerals that can help to burn fat. Dieters begin their day with what is called a Body Brilliance shake, a blend of fruit and vegetable concentrates, probiotics, antioxidants, ‘super greens’ and more, which is intended to reduce cravings and encourage a healthy body.

The thinking behind Bodyism is that filling up with healthy foods and nutrients reduces your cravings for sugary snacks. According to the Daily Mail, Duigan believes that excess sugar and processed drinks pollute the body, resulting in fat clinging to the hips, tummy, thighs and bottom.

The good news, according to Duigan, is that the body’s natural state is lean and fit, and once you rid your diet of all those toxins, your body can revert back to the state it is supposed to be in.

Healthy Foods to Eat

In Bodyism, Duigan advises eating berries with breakfast (great for vitamin C and fibre), turkey (the L-tryptophan in turkey releases the feel-good hormone serotonin) and dark green vegetables. Anyone following the Bodyism diet is encouraged to try to eat the vegetables for almost every meal, preferably making sure they are organic, benefiting from the vitamins contained within.

Other positive sources of food include avocados (the potassium can lower your stress levels); nuts (full of B vitamins – no more than a handful a day) and sweet potatoes (for when you must have carbs; sweet potatoes have more vitamins than normal potatoes).

Banned Foods

Of course, like most diets, certain foods are banned or are at least reduced.

As part of his belief that sugary and processed foods pollute the body, dieters are advised to cut out both. He points out that sugary food causes your blood pressure to crash, leaving you sluggish, while processed foods reduce the levels of minerals and vitamins within your body.

Other banned foods include junk foods (high in bad fats), caffeine (one or two cups of organic coffee a day is all that is allowed); alcohol (full of sugar and only serves to make you stressed) and salty food (increases your blood pressure). Avoid ham and bacon as they are the worst salty food offenders, according to Duigan.

Other Celebrity Fans of the Bodyism Diet

While Nigella hasn’t said anything publicly about her diet – maybe because the very food it bans is what her food is known for – other celebrities have been much more forthcoming.

Elle Macpherson and model/ actress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley are both fans of Duigan’s diet, with the former praising the diet as ‘easy to follow’ and the shakes as extremely helpful to maintaining strong and toned.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, for her part, cites the shakes as ‘yummy’ and credits Bodyism for helping her gain a body that is ‘lean, taut and strong, yet curvy and feminine.’

Nigella Lawson’s Post-Weight Loss Body

It remains to be seen if Nigella will also praise the diet publicly, but she is no doubt in a delicate position, as the chef is known for her sugary and cream-loaded meals – most of which would be rejected by the Bodyism plan.

It isn’t the first time her food has been rejected by dieters, however; if reports can be believed, her own husband Charles Saatchi lost four stone after eating eggs alone, and avoiding his wife’s food.

There’s one thing that the 52-year-old can’t hide, however, and that is her stunning weight loss. As she said before her new slimmer look, “Any woman who says that ‘I have never worried about my weight’ or ‘I’ve never gone on a diet’ is lying.”

It seems that is true for Nigella as well.

Maybe now that she can no longer be known as the ‘poster girl for the well-padded woman’, she will be known as the ‘poster girl for everything in moderation’.

Kirstie Alley is the very definition of a yo-yo dieter. Indeed, some would say that Kirstie is an example of how not to do weight loss. We, however, would rather praise her as an example of never giving up.

Especially because she now believes she has found a way to keep the weight off for good.

Kirstie’s weight loss trials have been public knowledge in the U.S. and the UK as she’s struggled with her weight in front of the cameras. She has been remarkably up front about her problems and her desperate desire to lose weight.

It must have been a bitter disappointment for the actress to eagerly represent weight loss company Jenny Craig only to have to subsequently part company with the diet brand because she’d put back on all of the 75 pounds she’d lost with the diet… and another ten besides. Especially after disrobing and donning a bikini for an Oprah special to show off her new figure.

Ouch.

Yet, Kirstie never gave up. It may have taken her a good few years, a lot of frustration – she admits her very public weight gain was ‘humiliating’ – but she’s done it again. She has lost a staggering 100lbs and this time, so far, shows no sign of putting any of it back on again.

She believes she has finally weaned herself from her crash diet history and is happy to share her diet and exercise tips and the lessons she’s learnt over the years…

Kirstie Alley on Being Overweight

It was a paparazzi photo of her that first encouraged Kirstie to sign up to the Jenny Craig diet and we all know how that turned out. Subsequently, she put on even more weight than before and at her heaviest, weighed 230 pounds.

Kirstie has always been very open about her weight issues, presumably recognising that it was there for everyone to see anyway. After her jubilant bikini appearance on Oprah, she was invited back to chat to the talk show queen again and accepted… but this time it was to talk about her weight gain.

No doubt just like her former Jenny Craig colleagues, Kirstie couldn’t believe she was still talking about her weight issues. She said at the time: “It’s humiliating. The most painful thing for me is that I have all these people that I inspired and then I let them down.

“When you’re a spokesperson for a weight loss company … somebody weighs you every week. It’s pressure but it’s good pressure. I do better if I have some pressure on me,” she told Oprah. “When I didn’t have that anymore … I just said, ‘I’m going to cut myself some slack.’ Big mistake.”

That little slack became an avalanche of weight gain; Kirstie subsequently revealed how she didn’t even weigh herself or work out for a year-and-a-half after parting ways with the Jenny Craig company.

“I’ve hated myself,” she revealed. “You beat yourself up, and I [asked myself], ‘What am I doing?’”

Of course, Kirstie was suffering through all of this in public, constantly watched by fans and critics alike. Some were all too vocal. She highlights one occasion when she was plagued by paparazzi trying to take her picture as she arrived home at the airport from France, tired and looking far from her best.

“First of all, I’d been on the plane and I looked hideous,” she says, explaining why she was trying to avoid having her picture taken, when “this guy said to me, ‘Fat ass, turn around so I can shoot you!’”

Needless to say it was humiliating but worse was yet to come. A few years later, while starring on Dancing with the Stars, the show she credits for her current weight loss breakthrough, she became the butt of harsh jokes by American talk show host George Lopez.

Reviewing her dancing performance on his show Lopez Tonight, he shocked the audience when he compared the Cheers actress to a pig.

“She did a nice job, her little hooves tapping away,” he said. “Before the show she went to the market, then she had roast beef, and this is her going all the way home,” he continued. The comedian subsequently apologised for his cruel comments but one can only imagine how hurt Kirstie must have been that someone would publicly joke about her long weight battle.

She got her own back, however, when she began to lose the weight, no doubt as a result of the many hours spent in dance rehearsals. She lost 38 inches in 10 weeks while on Dancing with the Stars.

Kirstie Alley on her New Post-Weight Loss Figure

Since coming second on Dancing with the Stars in May 2011 and losing the pounds, Kirstie has defied her critics to keep the weight off. What’s more, she has built on it, and at the last count, lost a staggering 100lbs. She is now a U.S. size six and is loving fitting into dresses that she could only dream about before.

She said: “Before Dancing with the Stars, I bought these dresses from size 14 to 4… all the same dress, and I said, ‘You know what I really want? I really wanna be in this dress in a four.’”

She claims she managed it, though subsequently told people that she was more likely a ‘stretchy size six’. While her exact dress size may be in dispute, however, the fact that she looks amazing is not. Somehow the weight loss not only showed off her new figure, but knocked years off her as well.

Now the 60-year-old could easily pass for someone 20 years younger, and it’s all natural. “I haven’t had plastic surgery, but here’s the reason: People do plastic surgery to make you look younger,” she told “Entertainment Tonight.” “I don’t think it makes you look younger … it can make you look weird.”

She also feels great too, and even wowed the audience at New York Fashion Week when she walked the catwalk – something even her biggest designer fans probably would never have asked her to do before her weight loss.

“I feel like I’m back in my element. I honestly didn’t even realise what I looked like,” she said.

“Now I have a lot more strength and stamina!”

But how did she really do it, and how did she not only keep the weight off, but continue to lose it after the dancing show finished?

Kirstie Alley on her Dieting Secrets

Kirstie believes she has a winning formula for her diet and is keen to share it with others. So much so that she has even set up her own website and diet programme called Organic Liaison. The diet programme was the result of a year-and-a-half of research and she claims she was following it during her time on Dancing with the Stars as well as afterwards.

The premise of Organic Liaison, as the name suggests, is to help people move from conventional eating habits to following a healthy organic diet and weight loss plan. It provides diet plans, organic weight loss products such as the USDA certified organic Rescue Me elixir, natural supplements and online tools.

Kirstie says she follows the programme just like anyone else and credits it with the bulk of her weight loss. Her programme recommends six small organic meals throughout the day, as opposed to three larger ones, with the first meal starting shortly after waking. The plan includes a weigh in each morning as well as the keeping of a calorie journal, documenting everything you’ve eaten throughout the day. It advocates reducing calories in order to lose weight, making sure the calories you eat are fewer than the calories you burn.

The programme does allow the occasional indulgences as long as you keep within your overall calorie limit and count it towards the carbohydrate portion of your meal.

Kirstie does admit to relying on appetite suppressant drinks to help keep her appetite under control.

When asked how she lost so much weight, the actress wasn’t afraid to plug her own products when she tweeted: “NO surgery, NO flippin lasers, NO barfing, NO starving…Jeez…my products, organic food, dance. Easy as pie…er, veggies!”

Kirstie Alley on Her Exercise Routine

Kirstie initially lost a lot of her weight thanks to dancing and she’s kept it up as part of a successful exercise regime. She still dances for up to three hours a day with professional dancers recommended by former Dancing with the Stars partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy, and admits that without dance she would struggle to maintain her weight loss.

The good news is that her exercise regime is something anyone can do, albeit you may not have quite the same amount of time to train and dance that Kirstie has.

Kirstie is so committed to dance that she encouraged everyone to join her in a grassroots campaign called 100 Days of Dance, in which she encouraged fans to dance for at least 30 minutes every day. She is recording herself dancing every day and sharing the videos online with her fans.

Kirstie is now a firm believer in the power of dance and having fun at the same time.

She says: “I wasn’t so hungry when I was dancing. That coupled with insane amounts of dancing, I’m sure I lost [the weight] faster … I had the energy the whole way through it and that was sort of astonishing.”

“I feel back to normal,” she adds. “I have my game again.”

We’ve often been warned about avoiding crash diets because of the strain that it can put on our heart and our health.

Now, following an interview with Black Swan star Mila Kunis, there’s another reason to avoid rapid unsustainable weight loss – because not only are you likely to put the weight back on again afterwards, but that weight could go to entirely different places than it was before.

An already slim Mila Kunis dropped 20 pounds to play Natalie Portman’s ballerina obsession in Black Swan. Weighing in at just 95 pounds, she told Harper’s Bazaar that “I was muscles, like a little brick house, but skin and bones.”

But it was when she came to put the weight back on that Mila really struggled. She says that the weight ended up in entirely different places to where it had first started out, adding ‘my body has never been the same’.

“My shape is different. When I gained [the weight] back, it went to completely different areas. I’d be happy if my ass got bigger. All the weight that left my chest went to my side hip, my stomach,” she told Harper’s.

Redistributed weight is quite common after dramatic weight loss and regain, say the experts.

Losing weight drastically can reduce muscle tissue which, instead of reappearing as muscle, comes back as fat. That fat is now likely to go wherever you’re genetically predisposed to get it.

Registered dietician and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Andrea N. Giancoli, told MSNBC: “Some people store fat in their bellies, others in their thighs or their breasts or their buttocks. Wherever you typically store fat, you’re going to see it go back there.”

Even worse, as weight loss typically slows down your metabolism in order for your body to burn the calories it does get more effectively, you gain weight even easier afterwards – and gain it as fat – until your metabolism kicks in again.

That’s why dieticians recommend you choose diet programmes that encourage sensible weight loss such as 1-2lbs per week. Such slow and steady weight loss allows your body to adapt and helps to reduce the lean muscle loss.

Says Andrea N. Giancoli: “Your body doesn’t like it when you lose weight that fast.”

She has recently been praised as the inspiration for singer Alexandra Burke’s return to the gym. The 23-year-old X-Factor singer recently unveiled her new size 8-10 figure for LOOK magazine and had one person to credit for the motivation to get fit: Myleene Klass.

Alexandra said: “I saw pictures of Myleene Klass in Barbados over Christmas and I was like: ‘Oh my God! How is she looking that good?’ So I started doing loads of classes at the gym.”

Alexandra isn’t the only one who looked at Myleene’s recent holiday photos with envy; we’ve often wondered how the mother-of-two can stay so slim, toned and energetic. Luckily for us, Myleene is happy to share her diet and fitness secrets…

Myleene Klass on Her Weight Issues

Ever since Myleene took to the jungle in her white bikini in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, people have been envious of her perfect beach-ready body. She created such as stir in the Rigby and Peller bikini that she auctioned it off on EBay afterwards, raising £7,000 for charity.

Refreshingly however, Myleene admits that her toned and fit figure doesn’t come naturally, giving hope to women everywhere.

Speaking about her fluctuating weight to Closer magazine, she confessed that she has been everything from a size eight to a size 16 in the past.

The latter was no doubt due to the fact that she loved to eat chocolate and pasta loaded with cheese; her size 16 weight was a lot for her 5ft 5ins frame and she recalls how self-conscious she felt.

Myleene says: “People look at me and think I’m a perfect size 8, but I’m not naturally slim. [At one point] I was so big, I had to unbutton my pants during a performance because they were too tight! I had cellulite on my arms and permanently wore a jumper around my waist to hide my bum.

“I even had a perm at one point because I thought that would help me look smaller.”

She added: “I’ve got a mixed heritage and have hips and boobs – I’m always going to be a big girl trapped in a small girl’s body!”

Her size 16 figure was a weight that her health couldn’t support, and the musician, presenter and model worked hard to shift it. Her hard work culminated in her size eight appearance on I’m A Celebrity and that shower under the waterfall.

After she came second in the show, she was inundated with modelling offers. She turned down Playboy but did agree to star in the M&S adverts alongside esteemed modelling greats such as Twiggy, Laura Bailey, Erin O’Connor, and Lizzie Jagger

“When we were shooting the ad in South Africa I was looking at them, and looking at me, and I had to keep telling myself that the reason I was there was that I didn’t look like a model,” she told the Daily Mail self-deprecatingly.

Myleene Klass on Being Curvy

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Myleene’s stunning figure is that she isn’t just another of those ‘skinny’ models whose purpose in life seems to be looking emaciated. If anything, she represents healthy vitality, with her curves proudly on display. While she was a size eight in the past, she admits it was perhaps her unhappiest time.

“What is really funny and ironic about all this is that I have completely gone against the accepted wisdom that the best things happen to women when they are at their thinnest. For me the opposite is true. When I was at my smallest – when I had dieted down to a size 8 – I was at my most unhappy.

“I was in a miserable relationship and my career was nowhere. The best things have happened to me when I am at my most natural and curvy.”

Myleene, now a mother of two, knows where her priorities are and maintains her healthy figure via a healthy exercise and diet plan.

Myleene Klass on Her Diet Secrets

The former Hear’Say singer has tried a few diets in her time, though she stresses that she avoids fad diets that promise rapid and unhealthy weight loss. However, nowadays she prefers to monitor her food intake via portion control, eating what she wants but moderating her intake. As a result, she never feels deprived with the food that she eats.

She believes that it provides a much healthier environment for her two daughters, Ava and Hero, stressing that she wants her children to see her as a healthy role model.

A typical day for Myleene would start with scrambled eggs or Cherios for breakfast, followed by a wrap, sushi or salad for lunch and pasta for dinner. She watches how much pasta she’s eating and adds in extra greens when she needs to.

She admits to being an emotional eater who could very easily overeat and put on weight, hence she tracks her intake carefully and adjusts where necessary.

She does admit, however, that it was breastfeeding her children that helped her to lose her pregnancy weight more than anything else.

“It’s true what they said about breastfeeding. It helps with weight loss. It burns up to 500 calories per day so it has definitely helped me lose the weight I put on during pregnancy. Becoming a mother has got to be the best diet and weight loss programme I’ve ever been in!”

Myleene Klass on Her Fitness Routine

Her children are also perhaps her biggest secret to keeping fit, Myleene admits. Walking, running and chasing around after two girls is her ‘ultimate form of fitness exercise’, she says.

She is also a fan of cardio exercises such as dancing, boxing, skipping and walking; you’ll rarely find her in the gym as she isn’t a fan. As you could predict, given her toned stomach, she also does a lot of sit ups to tighten that tummy.

Perhaps the most endearing thing about Myleene is that she doesn’t take her fantastic figure for granted. She works hard at it and tries to inspire others to do the same, hence signing up to the Birds Eye 100% fitness challenge in 2010. Family fitness and healthy eating are important to the 33-year-old but it’s her attitude that is her strongest weapon.

She says: “I look at pictures of me in a bikini and wish my legs were lean and gazelle-like but I build muscle easily, and I can look like Rambo so I have to be careful not to overdo exercise.

“I’m like all women – I’ve got cellulite and I’ll never be perfect but I try to make the best of what I’ve got.”

Good advice for all of us.

She was the scary one in the Spice Girls 15 years ago and life has certainly moved on for Mel B. She is now a 36-year-old mother-of-three and has a successful career in Australia as a judge on Aussie X-Factor, more recently also announced as the new presenter of Dancing with the Stars Australia.

In some respects, however, Mel B is back where she was 15 years ago when the Spice Girls first formed, but for a good reason. She has recently celebrated getting back her ‘Spice Girl’ body after months of being overweight.

The singer, who gave birth to daughter Madison just six months ago, has lost an impressive 33lbs (14 kilos) to get back to her previously toned and trim figure. So how did she do it?

Mel B on Why She Needed to Lose Weight

Mel B decided to lose weight after piling on the pounds during her third pregnancy.

“I [used to have] a six pack! I was very lean and fit. [After Madison] I gained a lot of weight. My legs, my butt, my tummy, my arms… it’s absolutely everywhere,” she told Woman’s Day magazine at the time. She admits: “I was indulging – basking in my pregnancy.”

She admits to eating morning, noon and night during her pregnancy, chowing down no matter what time it was. She was also so tired that she had no energy for exercise and it became a vicious circle, but it was primarily her ‘eating for England’ that saw her put on more than 60 pounds.

She admitted to StreetCorner.com.au: “I love my humps and bumps, but when a newspaper described my shape as the ‘bootylicious, curvylicious, post-baby body of Melanie, I knew I had to do something. I had to get the eating under control.

“When you’ve just had a baby, you want to get back into shape and remember what you felt like nine months ago. Especially working on camera and being in the public eye, you want to feel like you’re at your best.”

She stressed that she didn’t have chefs, personal trainers and nannies at her beck and call but was a busy working mother who needed help to lose the weight.

She admits trying to lose weight in the glare of the public wasn’t easy. “You know what, it’s not easy losing weight, and especially when you’re doing it in front of everyone. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I kind of had to do it. I was fat!”

Mel B on her Diet Tips

Mel B is upfront about the fact that she hates dieting. So she instead turned to Jenny Craig to help her lose the weight, preferring what she calls a ‘healthy eating plan’ as opposed to a diet. She was so busy, what with her new baby and tiring schedule on Australian X-Factor, that she needed an organised programme to help keep her on track.

She said at the time: “For me, doing Jenny Craig was a no-brainer. With my newborn and working nine-hour days on the X Factor, I already have so much to focus on. I just don’t have the time to think about losing weight.”

Jenny Craig is probably best known for its calorie-counted pre-packaged food that can be delivered to your door, supplying breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack each day. The food is intended to be supplemented by your own vegetables, fruits and low-fat dairy.

It promotes a Mind, Food and Body approach – as well as supplying healthy low-calorie meals, it also supplies a personalised activity programme for you based on your targets, and a personal consultant to work with you to discuss and identify your particular issues around eating.

Your personal weight loss coach works out how many calories you need to eat per day and what your exercise regime should be.

Mel B was put on a special Jenny Craig diet programme designed for breastfeeding mothers, taking into account the nutrients needed. Her diet consisted of healthy foods, healthy snack options and an abundance of fruits and vegetables. She underwent the same programme that any other Jenny Craig breastfeeding mother would be given.

Mel B said of the programme: “The weekly check-ins with my consultant kept me on track; we became ‘besties’!  And the food was delicious; you get to eat fish and chips, chicken fettuccine and chicken parmigiana!”

She added: “It’s important for us mums to live healthy and to be in good shape. Mums really need to take time for themselves and get to a place where they are happy with their body again. We should not put it off because we deserve more than that. A healthy happy mum equals a healthy happy family.”

Mel B signed on to be the latest Jenny Craig spokesperson for Australia and New Zealand and on the Friends of Jenny Craig website, says: “Calling Jenny for help was the best decision I ever made.  I did have a little help along the way – my very own Jenny coach but the good thing is that everyone who joins Jenny gets this – and it honestly makes the world of difference.

“Jenny has provided me the tools to know what to eat, when to eat it and now with Jenny’s Healthy Living for Families cookbook – I am making sure that what I learnt from Jenny is passed on my family.”

Mel B on her Post-Weight Loss Figure

Mel B lost 33lbs in 20 weeks on the Jenny Craig plan and loves her new look.

“My body is not only back to the shape it used to be, I actually feel better than before because I know I have earned it,” she says. “It’s not something I just woke up to and BAM – there it was.  Being my third pregnancy and in my 30’s it was much easier to gain weight this time round!  I was not looking forward to the chore of losing the weight at all.”

She believes the weight loss has given her more energy to devote to her children.

She now weighs just over nine stone and has shrunk so much that she can even get into her 13-year-old daughter Phoenix Chi’s jeans. Mel says: “Well, the jeans were mine in the first place. She stole them off me when I was pregnant, but now I fit back into them. So I’m taking them back, one by one.”

Since losing the weight, she has treated herself to a lingerie spree, though she is yet to venture out and buy a bikini, but plans to throw herself into the healthy Australian lifestyle that she couldn’t really enjoy before. She prides herself on having gained her Spice Girls’ six-pack back and says she is ready for a rumoured Spice Girls Reunion tour. She may have a few more tattoos and look a little older in the face, but otherwise she thinks she can pull it off – albeit hopefully without the bra tops, hot pants and platform heels this time around.

The singer and presenter admits she’ll never be a stick insect – “I’m a curvy girl with big boobs and a bum” – but says she simply wants to be healthy. She recently complained that women are their own worst enemy, putting pressure on themselves to lose weight and look good.

Instead, she wanted to do a weight loss programme that allowed her to lose the weight slowly and healthily and believes she found it in Jenny Craig.

The weight loss plan has been criticised in the past, however, by dieters who lost weight but then put it straight back on after finishing the programme. Kirstie Alley, a previous Jenny Craig spokesperson, is testament to that. The actress regained the 70 pounds that she lost on Jenny Craig; not surprisingly, she no longer represents the company, though Jenny Craig does point out that she maintained her weight loss during the three years that she was associated with them.

Let’s hope that Mel has better luck. She is certainly thrilled with the weight loss so far, believing she has much more to contribute to her family now.

She concludes: “Losing weight has made me the best mum possible. My energy’s up!”

Celebrity mother-to-be Jessica Simpson has reportedly signed a $3 million deal with Weight Watchers.

The pregnant singer and actress, known for her yo-yo weight troubles in the past, has apparently signed up with the popular diet group to demonstrate how well she can lose her extra pregnancy weight once her baby is born.

According to the New York Post, Simpson was approached by several different weight loss companies before settling for Weight Watchers.

The star reportedly just wants to shed her baby weight, while the company believes she could go even further and get back to her impressive Dukes of Hazzard days.

Simpson has already confessed that she’s been partial to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches during her pregnancy and hasn’t been watching her weight so she may have a significant sum to lose.

She is also planning to wed her fiancé Eric Johnson after the baby is born, and no doubt will want to lose weight to look her best on her wedding day.

If the reports are accurate, the star will use the Weight Watchers ProPoints plan to lose the weight and follow in the footsteps of Jennifer Hudson to become another celebrity spokesperson for the brand.

Hudson lost an impressive 80 pounds through Weight Watchers and even got her family members on board; together, they lost more than 2,000 pounds collectively.

Hudson told the Huffington Post she initially resisted dieting, saying: “I just thought it didn’t sound realistic to me. I had the diet mentality [of] thinking that to lose weight you have to deprive yourself or you have to work out massively so I had to get that out of my head, get out of that state of mind and trust the plan and that’s what I’ve done to this day. The key thing is figuring out what your issues are, and it’s really never about the food.”

Hudson and, if true, Simpson are part of a growing vanguard of celebrities who are choosing to endorse big diet brands; Carrie Fisher represented Jenny Craig after losing 30 pounds, and Mel B is currently endorsing the Australian company as well.

Emmerdale actress Pauline Quirke suffered several humiliations by virtue of her size in the past.

Being told she needed a hip replacement at the age of 49 was the first evidence of the toll her weight was taking on her body. Weighing in at just shy of 20 stones at her heaviest, she also recalls being mortified when her aeroplane seatbelt just wouldn’t fit around her girth and she had to ask for an extension belt usually reserved for mothers with babies.

Another time, she very nearly had to call the hotel reception where she was staying to report that she’d got stuck in the bath, but it was when she fell and broke her arm that she knew she had to make changes in her life.

“It wasn’t connected directly to my weight,” she told the Mirror, “but, let’s face it, if there’s nearly 20st falling on top of a bone you’ve more chance of breaking it than if you’re 12st.”

The actress, who first came to public attention in Birds of a Feather, admits she has always been a bit on the larger size, but her unhealthy eating habits and lack of exercise led to her weight ballooning over the years.

To make matters worse, she weighed herself and realised for the first time that she weighed 19 stone 6lbs, very nearly the same as a sumo wrestler. Before that, she had avoided the scales.

“I knew I was getting bigger – you know by the clothes you’re wearing. You just don’t really acknowledge it, you just buy the next size up. By the time I broke my arm I was in size 26 or 28 clothes. That was when I decided to do something drastic.

“It’s called ‘morbidly’ obese for a reason – because it’s associated with a bigger risk of dying.”

That was then. This is now. And now the ‘new’ Pauline is lighter than ever and has lost an incredible eight stone. As she says: “I used to carry the weight of another person on my back. That person’s not there anymore – and I don’t miss her!”

So how did she do it? How did she lose so much weight and end up looking so fabulous? She shares her tips…

Pauline Quirke On What First Drove Her To Put On Weight

In her book, Where Have I Gone? My Life In A Year by Pauline Quirke, the actress is brutally honest with herself and her readers about the reasons for her weight gain in the first place.

She says: “I’m not big-boned or pleasantly plump or anything else for that matter. I’m just fat!”

She didn’t have a medical condition that would explain her weight (though she sometimes wished that she had), and said she didn’t have an unhealthy relationship with food. She just simply ate too much of it and continued to do so for 30 years.

She added: “I have managed to get this fat all by myself because I’m greedy. I eat and drink too much and I exercise too little.”

Pauline Quirke on Her Old Unhealthy Diet

Pauline’s weight gain isn’t surprising when you take a look at the sort of diet she used to eat. While she wasn’t gorging on doughnuts and fried bread every day, her regular meals out would include prawn cocktail and haddock and chips, while bacon sandwiches became her standard morning fare.

When she joined Emmerdale as character Hazel Rhodes, her eating didn’t get any better, despite already pledging to diet. Instead she enjoyed her bacon or sausage roll in the morning, followed by a full meal at lunchtime and then home cooked dinner again at night. Living above an Indian restaurant also didn’t help the woman who loved curries.

When she later began her diet in earnest, she began to notice just how different her eating habits were to most people’s. She would always, without fail, eat a starter; her portion control involved nothing more than making sure her plate was full and she would never dream of sharing a desert. If she ate salad, it came with a big pile of grated cheese and she all too often finished her meals with a cheeseboard.

Pauline Quirke On Her Weight Loss

Pauline was at her lowest ebb when she fell and broke her arm. She was watching a TV programme about sumo wrestlers – which told her the average sumo wrestler was 20 stone – when she finally began to question her own weight. As she says, ‘I had lost track of how fat I’d become’. Her weighing scales told her the upsetting news.

Pauline was finally determined to lose the pounds. She had already tried dieting on her own once before, alongside the aid of a personal trainer, and found that she just couldn’t stick to it. She was determined to lose the pounds without any surgical help, however, telling Woman magazine that she didn’t want to opt for a gastric band or liposuction.

Instead, she opted for the somewhat controversial meal replacement company LighterLife, after the company approached her. It promised her everything she would need, plus access to a counsellor and group meetings, if she would stand as evidence of their success once she lost the weight.

LighterLife has been criticised by many for its severe food and drink restrictions. The programme replaces meals with low carbohydrate, low-calorie and high protein food packs that are mixed with cold or hot water. You also have soups, shakes and snack bars, and a very strict limit per day. Alcohol is off the menu and only black coffee or tea (or water) is allowed.

Pauline admits the diet is drastic. Some experts have gone further and called it unhealthy, as it encourages you to eat just over 500 calories a day. Any diet under 1,000 calories is classed as very low calorie and for this reason, the NHS recommends that you only follow such a restrictive diet for a short period of time. Some dieticians warn that the diet can leave you with long-term health problems.

The programme offers compulsory 90 minute weekly counselling sessions to deal with the psychological impact of eating and dieting.

Pauline recognises the diet’s controversy, but points out that you can’t argue with her results. After just eight days on the LighterLife diet, she lost 10lbs.

“It’s not for everyone,” she told people at the time. “But this is the best way for me.”

Pauline Quirke On Her New Look

It would seem that Pauline was right. Today she is looking fabulous after losing an incredible eight stone and now measures a size 12.

She doesn’t pretend the diet has been easy – there were some weeks where her weight loss hardly even registered and she questioned all the hard work – but she managed to stick to it.

The day she was given a script for her Emmerdale character Hazel Rhodes and her weight loss was mentioned was a day she was incredibly proud of; her changing shape had become noticeable.

Since then, Pauline has become synonymous with weight loss and is rarely mentioned without the inevitable comments of how amazing she looks.

“The truth is that nothing I could eat is going to taste as good as the fantastic feedback I’m getting. Apart from becoming the incredible shrinking woman, I have also noticed something that I’d almost forgotten: I actually have bones!” she wrote in her book.

She relives the moment her new look really sunk in after going on a photo shoot. Refusing to look at the pictures out of habit, the photographer begged her to see it and when she did she saw a completely different woman, a slim, healthy and pretty woman.

“I felt a lump rise in my throat  and tears stinging my eyes. That pretty girl on the screen really was me,” she says emotionally.

She summarises: “Some people lose weight because they hate the way they look, other people do it to get into nice clothes. That wasn’t the motivation for me, I didn’t care about that stuff. For me, it was my health, and that’s why I was able to finally do it. I had to.”

It’s still early days for Pauline’s new weight. Critics of the LighterLife plan say that dieters will tend to put the weight back on afterwards as it fails to deal with their underlying overeating problems.

Pauline, however, has kept the weight off for six months so far and believes she has battled her weight loss demons and won.

If reports can be believed, Jennifer Aniston has tried many of the fad diets going, from the Zone Diet to the Baby Food Diet and probably more besides.

Now that she’s in her 40s, however, she has settled for clean living, exercise and sensible eating habits and we’re seeing the real Jen emerge – and she looks amazing. She only seems to get better with age, now boasting the sort of body that a woman in her 20s would kill for.

Just one look at her flawless figure gives us some indication of just how much blood, sweat and tears she must put into her workout; there’s no way that those perfectly toned legs and muscles come from a good diet alone.

The former Friends actress is happy to talk about her diet and exercise regime and admits that she has to put in the effort; we like her even more that she doesn’t pretend it comes easy.

“You don’t hit some level and just coast. I take care of myself, that’s first and foremost. There are times when I don’t take as good care of myself and times when I do. But it just feels good to be healthy and with that comes physical exercise and keeping yourself in shape,” she told iVillage.com.

She points out that being comfortable in your own skin, however, is the most important thing.

“You’re damned if you’re too thin, and you’re damned if you’re too heavy. According to the press, I’ve been both. It’s impossible to satisfy everyone and I suggest we all stop trying.”

Lucky for us, the actress is more than happy to share her health, diet and fitness tips…

Jennifer Aniston’s Health Tips

As well as her extensive exercise and diet tips, Jennifer has two key pieces of advice for us all: drink lots of water and sleep for at least eight hours a night.

“I drink lots of water – water, water, water. The one thing I notice in my skin is, if I stop drinking water, I dehydrate badly and get crepey. Water is important. And sleeping.”

The good news is that it is possible to look like Jennifer Aniston and indulge occasionally, as long as you’re willing to put the hard work in the rest of the time.

Jennifer Aniston’s Diet Tips

Once upon a time, Jennifer admits, there was a Friend whose eating habits used to include pre-packaged Zone meals, the odd bit of cheese and overcooked takeaway. Jen admits her diet was far from ideal.

Now, thanks to the influence of personal chefs Jewel and Jill Elmore, authors of The Family Chef: Make Your Kitchen the Heart of Your Family, Jennifer has opened up her fridge and cupboards to the power of healthy food, “real food—food that’s truly and naturally life-sustaining and delicious.”

“Jewel changed the way I see a kitchen from a place to store Power Bars (my once upon-a-time alternative to all food groups!) to a sanctuary that has become the most important room in the house, filled with sights and smells that are themselves a feast.”

She cites her favourite snack as white peaches with string cheese, but admits she also treats herself to the not-so-healthy chips and guacamole, with a margarita to go with it, now and again, adding “I pretty much go to grease, fried foods, salt.”

As you would expect from a woman with her obvious willpower, however, Jennifer doesn’t allow herself to indulge too often. She keeps her diet clean instead with lots of fresh vegetables.
When she cooks, she likes simple offerings, such as steak and grilled vegetables, along with a Greek salad. Jennifer is known for her love of salads and lean protein.

Speaking to Fox News in the U.S. about Jennifer’s enviable physique, trainer Joy Di Palma stresses that it takes more than exercise to get a body like Jennifer’s. Diet plays an important role too, giving the body the energy that it needs to push it to the limit.

Di Palma recommends eating several small meals a day in order to keep the metabolism going, and to eat a diet high in protein in order to get the groundwork just right, suggesting snacking on food like cottage cheese, fruit and almonds, as well as eating complex carbohydrates such as brown rice, sweet potatoes and oatmeal to keep energy levels high.

A devotee of the Zone Diet for a long time, it’s likely that Jennifer still follows the basic principles of the diet – namely high in protein and lower in the wrong type of carbs and fat. She does freely admit to indulging in coffee and dairy, however.

“I eat very well, I indulge when I want to indulge, I work out often, I do yoga, I do everything. I change it up. I try to do something every day, even if it’s just twenty minutes a day, just to get your body sweating and blood pumping. It gives you a good day of energy,” she told Zimbio.com.

Jennifer Aniston’s Exercise Tips

So what is the secret to Jen’s eternally youthful figure? The actress puts it down to hard work, exercise and never resting on her laurels. She’s well known as a fan of yoga, for instance, but she doesn’t just leave it there; she boosts the empowering effect of yoga with different forms of exercise to make sure her body never adapts or plateaus.

“I noticed dramatic changes in my body after I started doing yoga, but I also think you have to shake things up,” she told Shape magazine. “I have a Spin bike, an elliptical, and a treadmill, and I do cardio for at least 20 minutes a day. Even that short burst makes a difference.”

If she has only ten minutes in which to exercise, she’ll jump on her spin bike and mix and match the settings, going uphill, downhill and then sprinting.

Jen likes to do a bit of cardio – running or working on the treadmill or elliptical trainer – as a warm up to the yoga, often doing 20 minutes or more before her yoga session. She told Self magazine that she likes to do one minute of high-intensity cardio workout after a five minute warm up, before allowing herself two minutes of recovery. On certain days, she’ll even add in interval training on the elliptical, adding a 15 minute run before she stretches her body with yoga.

Jennifer has also worked out with celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson, famous for sculpting the bodies of fellow Friend Courtney Cox and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Yoga, however, is always the one constant. Jennifer is a fan of hatha yoga, which she does three to four times a week.

“It keeps my body strong, and if my body is strong it keeps me able to sleep better, function in the day better and I can do my job better. It’s been wonderful for me.”

She credits the yoga, which she took up shortly after her split from ex-husband Brad Pitt, as connecting her body and mind, infusing her with a positivity that she now takes throughout her daily life.

She has yoga instructor Mandy Ingber custom-design special yoga lessons for her that she does in the privacy of her own home; Mandy boosts the effects of the yoga by adding in strength training movements such as lunges or scissor kicks to build extra strength into those muscles.

Other celebrity trainers such as Marco Borges believe Jennifer developed her lean muscles thanks to yoga positions dedicated to strengthening the core, such as planks and crescents.

Mandy, Jennifer’s yoga teacher, offers her advice to anyone wanting to follow in Jennifer’s footsteps. She recommends starting with a level one yoga beginner’s class, informing the teacher that you’re new and standing at the back of the class in order to follow the poses, and trying at least five or six different classes until you find the one that is right for you. She also advocates the power of breathing – taking just five to 15 minutes to sit and do nothing but breathe and clear the mind.

There’s no doubt that Jennifer pushes her body to the limit when it comes to her exercise regime. Refreshingly, however, she admits to taking days off from exercise as well.

“It’s important to rest the body,” she insists. “I can go a whole week saying, ‘I’m not going to work out.’ Your body will tell you what it needs.”

And a Final Word on… Jennifer Aniston’s Hair
It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t give a quick mention to Jennifer Aniston’s famous locks, the inspiration for ‘Rachel’ cuts everywhere.

You’ll be pleased to know that Jennifer’s hair secrets are just as realistic as her diet and fitness tips.

“I just cut it and I condition it. Just L’Oreal. The fancy stuff always seems to not work,” she says.

That last line could sum up her whole diet and fitness ethos and is good advice to us all.

Lucy-Jo Hudson is just a shadow of her former self. The former Coronation Street star, who was a size 14 when she last walked the cobbles in 2005, now boasts a trim size eight figure.

Lucy-Jo lost the weight in preparation for her 2009 wedding to fellow Corrie star Alan Halsall (Tyrone Dobbs) and has proudly kept the weight off ever since.

Now returning to ITV’s Wild At Heart, the 28-year-old is walking proof that gaining control of your eating habits can transform your looks, your health and your happiness. She shared her diet and fitness secrets.

Lucy-Jo Hudson on her Pre-Weight Loss Size 14 Figure

Lucy-Jo is now almost unrecognisable as moody Katy Harris in Coronation Street, the character she played from 2002 to 2005. As well as the punk and somewhat out there hairstyles that Katy favoured during her time on the street, Lucy-Jo’s Katy also carried some extra weight.

Lucy-Jo said she always thought of herself as ‘chunky’ during the role that placed her in the public eye, as the weight gradually piled on throughout her time on the show. Her confidence started to falter as she began to dress to cover up, and avoided going out or being photographed with her cast mates Tina O’Brien and Nikki Sanderson who she said ‘always looked gorgeous’.

“I got rolls of fat on my stomach at Corrie, but it was my own fault for eating so much and not exercising,” she told Closer Diets. “I felt my confidence slipping away. I was covering myself up because I didn’t feel comfortable in my clothes any more. I couldn’t show off my belly.”

She added: “I didn’t feel I could go out with Tina and Nikki because they always look gorgeous. They’re my best friends and I was never jealous or envious of them, I just always wanted to be like them. When we did photo shoots together, I always felt on the heavy side.”

Her dramatic exit storyline from Corrie issued a challenge not only to her acting skills, but to her willpower as well. Her character Katy beat her father to death for ending her relationship with the much older Martin Platt and joking about it. Overcome with guilt and grief when her mother Angela then ‘confessed’ to the killing in order to protect her daughter, diabetic Katy committed suicide by drinking and eating sugar and not taking her insulin.

Not surprisingly, the emotional role took its toll on Lucy-Jo. She later said she found it hard to deal with the constant emotions on set and turned to chocolate as a way of coping.

“I ate so much chocolate while I was doing those draining storylines, my stomach used to ache all the time, and then I’d eat a whole lot again the next day. I was constantly overloading my belly which is why I had a big stomach.”

Like many of us, she tried her hand at weight loss but ended up trapped in a yo-yo dieting spiral.

“Every week I’d say my diet starts on Monday, and every week it would go wrong. My trousers were getting too small, but I just thought they’d shrunk. Then I saw a photo of myself and I got a real shock. I was so upset. Eventually Mum told me I’d let myself go and should start looking at my diet. By then I was creeping towards a size 14.”

Lucy-Jo Hudson’s Diet Tips

That photograph was a turning point. After realising just how much weight she had put on, Lucy-Jo signed up with Closer Diets and started to work on her issues, helped by fitness expert Tonia Czerniawskyi.

She dropped two dress sizes and lost three-quarters of a stone with Closer Diets. She worked on learning how to control her eating and avoid feeling bloated, and how to build up her fitness so she could work out for up to two hours at a time.

Since then, she has taken the rules and tips she learnt from Closer Diets and kept up the weight loss, to finally settle at a size eight.

She credits one of the tricks she learnt – to eat smaller meals more often – as helping to change her eating regime for the better.

“Back when I ate stodge and ready meals, I had no energy and felt tired and sluggish, but eating smaller, lighter meals has made a huge difference. Now I eat little and often instead of having big meals. I’ll have six mini meals a day just to keep the metabolism kicking in.”

Other new healthy eating habits include making sure not to eat after 7.30pm and to eat carbs during the day but protein at night.

She makes sure not to be too strict, however, and keeps snacks in her fridge and on set to avoid getting hungry (and, as she admits, moody). She also eats a little chocolate every day but restricts her alcohol intake.

By far the most positive contribution to her new eating regime, however, was to reject unhealthy eating traditions started in childhood.

“My sister, brother and I were brought up to finish everything on our plates, but Tonia trained me to leave something and not to over-stretch my stomach,” she said.

Lucy-Jo Hudson’s Exercise Tips

Lucy-Jo began a new fitness regime by doing three two-hour training sessions a week and kept it up.

“I lost weight because every bride wants to look their best so I started looking after my health more. I started exercising too and I’ve sort of kept it up,” she told the Daily Mirror. “Cardio never seemed to work with me but now I do a lot more resistance work, with weights and squats and lunges. I think the more muscle you have, the more fat you burn.”

Her diet and exercise regime are certainly working and Lucy-Jo’s recent appearance on This Morning inspired a lot of people.

Discussing her weight loss on Twitter, which some viewers had seen for the first time, one viewer said: “How much weight has lucy-jo hudson lost since she was in @itvcorrie she looks stunning! @itvthismorning.”

Lucy-Jo herself wrote back: “It’s all about a way of life! No quick fixes or diets, just healthy eating and exercise! Creating new habits.”

She added: “I’m super healthy and fitter than ever.”

Lucy-Jo Hudson on her New Body

It’s easy to see that Lucy-Jo is much more confident now about her new body and figure. Combined with returning to Wild at Heart to resurrect her character Rosie Trevanion and her happy three year marriage, she’s riding high. She admits she feels fantastic now.

Speaking to Closer Diets, she said: “For two years I wasn’t comfortable in my body, but now I’m feeling fantastic. I’m wearing jeans I couldn’t get into for ages, and showing off my arms, which used to be flabby. It’s brilliant!”

Of course, hubby Alan would seem to be a typical man – despite losing a lot of weight and toning up as a result of her exercise regime, he professes not to notice Lucy-Jo’s new figure. “He just says: ‘You still look the same to me.’”

Thankfully she had her women friends – and complete strangers on Twitter – to comment on her amazing transformation.

It seems like life is really starting to move forward for Lucy-Jo. As well as being healthy, happy and gainfully employed (not always easy in the acting world), Lucy-Jo is already talking about having children in the future, especially after seeing how co-star Amanda Holden has successfully handled motherhood.

“She’s a rare gem, Amanda. She knows what she wants and manages to get it. She’s proof you can make that change and have kids.”

No doubt Lucy-Jo will put as much dedication into her future happiness as she did into her weight loss.

She has been described as a ‘wickedly funny, brutally honest, pint-size, potty-mouthed spitfire’ by Rolling Stone magazine, and Kelly Osbourne has certainly had her share of life’s drama.

Certainly profane at times but never boring, she shot to fame in MTV reality show The Osbournes with parents Sharon and Ozzy and the rest of her dysfunctional family.

Bearing her soul on TV at just 17 years old, as she was when The Osbournes first aired, can’t have been easy; indeed Kelly has described it as ‘stressful’.

However, since the show ended, she has made the headlines as much for her yo-yo dieting and much publicised battle with prescription drug Vicodin, in which she went to rehab three times, as for anything her family have done.

Now she is making headlines of another sort – for losing up to 50 pounds in weight, and, unusually for Kelly, keeping it off. She admits she hasn’t been the best role model for healthy living in the past, but all of that is behind her now as she embraces a healthier lifestyle.

She has been keen to share her weight loss secrets with fans and fellow dieters alike, being characteristically blunt and honest about her former problems with food and how she has finally won her weight loss battles…

Kelly Osbourne on Being an Emotional Eater

It was obvious that even from a young age Kelly struggled with her weight. What may not have been quite so obvious to those of us watching from the side-lines, however, is that she also suffered from bouts of depression and emotional eating.

Growing up in the public eye was particularly tough. Kelly was often teased by the press for her weight, with the result that she ended up hating herself.

“I was called fat and ugly in the press almost my entire life,” Kelly told Shape magazine in 2010. “I understand that being judged by others comes with the territory, but it broke my heart and ruined my self-esteem.

“It sets you up to hate yourself in a huge way. I was so angry about the things people said about me. I truly believe it’s the main reason I turned to Vicodin and ended up in rehab three times. I just hated myself.”

After the drugs came the food. She admitted that after she left rehab, she turned to food to take the pain away, bingeing whenever she felt down.

“I’d order a pizza and eat my emotions away,” she said. The only result was that she got fatter and fatter, which made her hate herself more.

It was only when she signed up for Dancing with the Stars in 2009 that she came to realise just how bad her diet really was. She couldn’t understand why she felt so bad in rehearsals, why she was feeling sick or even why she wasn’t losing any weight despite the gruelling dance workouts, when the reality was that she was gorging on French fries and pizza all day.

Her diet left her no energy to join in with rehearsals or to commit in the way that she wanted to. That’s when her Dancing with the Stars dance partner, Louis van Amstel, came to her rescue. He taught her about healthy eating and encouraged her to work out six hours a day in order to get fit.

“He made me eat turkey burgers and salads and explained to me that a high-protein, low-carb diet would keep me energised,” she said. “Then I started losing weight and realized, ‘Oh, it’s true what they say: Diet and exercise really work!’”

Dancing with the Stars was the beginning of Kelly’s rebirth as she lost 20 pounds during her time on the show.

Kelly Osbourne on Crazy Fad Diets

Of course, her impressive Dancing with the Stars weight loss wasn’t the first time Kelly had lost weight, though it was certainly the most enduring. Kelly admits to being a victim of fad diets in the past.

She lost nearly 40 pounds on the Blood Type Diet but, as any nutritionist could have told her, she gained it all back before the 2009 dance show.

In her earlier desperation to lose weight, she also tried other extreme tactics, such as taking ADHD medicine that was also meant to suppress the appetite, or taking diet pills. She also starved herself until she felt sick and was shaking, and tried the Atkins Diet but “had to eat so much meat and cheese, I hated it. No vegetables. I felt dirty when I ate like that.”

Her new found knowledge of diet and exercise gained from her time on Dancing with the Stars, however, has stayed with her and she has since gone on to build on that success and lose even more weight. What’s more, she has now learnt how to keep the weight off as well.

“I’ve completely changed the way I eat since doing Dancing with The Stars,’ she told U.S. magazine Life & Style.

Kelly Osbourne’s Diet Tips

After she finished Dancing with the Stars, Kelly was horrified to discover the weight was slowly starting to creep back on and decided to get serious with her health.

Now her diet focuses on being low-carb and sugar-free, concentrating on protein and vegetables.

She cites her diet secrets as portion control and no longer bingeing, combined with being active.

She no longer eats chips, pizza, cookies or drinks soda all day long, preferring instead salads, egg white omelettes, turkey burgers and grilled chicken. She shares her tips for healthy but fulfilling snacks, listing sugar-free jelly, sliced cucumbers and apple as her preferred snacks for mid-morning and evening.

She is adamant, however, that ‘a little of what you fancy does you good.’ “If I want a piece of cake I’m going to eat a f***ing piece of cake,” Kelly says in her typically forthright way. “You just have to learn your boundaries.”

She isn’t afraid to indulge now and again, with pizza and Brie her favourite treats, but she says: “Now, when I’m full? I stop eating! It may have taken me years to figure it out, but I’ve finally learnt how to do it right.”

It no doubt helps that she doesn’t have junk food in her house anymore.

One of Kelly’s biggest diet secrets, however, is a humble apple… half of which she eats just before she goes to bed.

Kelly says: “They say you should never eat before you go to bed but a trick I’ve learnt is to eat just a little bit of something that has no carbs and no sugar in it before you go to sleep because it keeps your metabolism going. I’ve found just having a tiny little snack - like half an apple or something like that - before you go to sleep really helps.”

Kelly Osbourne’s Exercise Regime

For someone who has lost 50 pounds and is doing an impressive job of keeping that weight off long-term, it’s refreshing to hear Kelly admit that she ‘hates working out’ … and, like many of us when we first start a new exercise regime, used to detest seeing herself in the mirror.

“I would look at myself and think, ‘Ugh!’ I was miserable. To get to the gym—when you already don’t like yourself—is really hard.”

She refused to accept defeat, however, and took little steps to make going to the gym fun.

“I started wearing cute outfits and putting on a little bit of makeup. And as vain as it sounds, it really helped me because eventually I stopped hating the way I looked.”

Since then, she hasn’t let anything stop her from taking the exercise she needs to keep in great shape. She has kept up her dancing since appearing on Dancing with the Stars and was also a fan of Pilates.

“Pilates is amazing, my posture is so much better and I’m even starting to get muscles on my tummy - it’s incredible,” she said.

She also took up the fat-burning exercise, the Bar Method, for a while and credits it for sculpting her body to look even better than it did in her Dancing with the Stars days. The Bar Method combines interval training with muscle-shaping isometrics and dance conditioning to target all the major muscle groups and improve posture.

Kelly told Us Weekly that she took a 60-minute class three times a week. “Not every day,” she said. “I don’t have that kind of dedication! Working out sucks. It’s miserable. You sweat and you stink, but then you’re done — and you see that just taking an hour three times a week can change you so much. It becomes addictive.”

After that, she upped her exercise regime to work with trainer Sarah Hagaman in Los Angeles. She did strength training three days a week and 30 minutes of running on the treadmill the other four days.

In addition, she has also recently got hooked on exercise class plyometrics, an exercise regime intended to improve the power in your muscles.

“It’s a killer—it hurts so much. But when you walk out of there, you’re like, ‘I can’t believe I just did that and my body looks this good.’”

There’s no doubt Kelly now takes her exercise regime very seriously, and the results speak for themselves.

At her heaviest, she was a UK size 18, a lot of weight for a petite 5ft 2in woman to be carrying around. Now she is staying steady on the scales at a UK size 6-8 and she is so much happier with her life.

She’s endearingly upfront about her love for her new figure and is clearly delighted with the way she looks now, even going so far as to tweet pictures of her very trim stomach. The days of being picked on, humiliated and bullied for her weight are long behind her.

She told Shape magazine: “Ultimately, I’m really glad I lost the weight the way I did. I never thought in a million years I’d be that healthy girl who wakes up every morning to exercise. After being called ‘cherubic and chubby,’ I’m rocking a bikini!”

She adds: “’Everyone always asks ‘What is the secret?’ But there really is no secret. It is the old fashioned way of making a commitment to yourself and waking up every day and doing it.”

She’s had a few hard knocks over the years and her weight often seems to reflect her emotional traumas but Kerry Katona says she is back on form.

The mother-of-four kicked off a detox before Christmas to lose a stone in just one month. She decided something had to be done after gaining weight following her stint in the Celebrity Big Brother house, when she continued to eat cheese and bread even after her eviction.

The former singer kicked off the weight loss detox with an intensive four-day session at GI Jane Boot Camp, where she shed an impressive 2lbs each day.

The boot camp, located near to London, pledges to push clients harder than they’ve ever been pushed, encouraging participants to take part in an intensive boot camp training schedule designed by military physical trainers – people who are still serving in the British Army. The activities are intended to strengthen endurance, cardio fitness, as well as general fitness and go hand-in-hand with a nutritionally balanced diet plan.

It certainly seems to have worked for Kerry. The 31-year-old told Closer magazine: “I was eating loads of bread and cheese – that’s why I put on weight. I’d gained a stone, but going to boot camp gave me the kick up the bum I needed.”

She built on the boot camp weight loss by continuing to work with her trainer Liam Lonergan on her return home. Together, the trainer and boot camp sessions helped her to drop from a size 10 to 12 to a size 8 to 10, losing a stone.

Kerry even maintained her healthy eating habits over the festive break. She said: “I pigged out on a massive Christmas dinner, but I was good for the rest of the day. Luckily, I’ve never liked mince pies or Christmas pud.”

In total, she had just two days off from her detox.

Kerry, of course, is no stranger to dieting. At her biggest, she was 12 stone and at her smallest, in 2009, she weighed just 8st 5lbs thanks to an extreme exercise regime – a weight she now admits was unrealistic and impossible to maintain.

This time around, she’s focusing on being healthy as opposed to skinny.

Kerry added: “Being healthy is manageable as long as you’re in a routine. You need to eat little and often – but I don’t like the word diet.”

She does admit, however, that she would opt for a tummy tuck to improve her post-baby tummy if she could afford it.

“In the past few weeks, my arms have become super toned. I feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger… but I still hate my stomach. If I could afford it, I’d have a tummy tuck.”

As a former Ultimo lingerie model, Penny Lancaster, wife of legendary rocker Rod Stewart, is used to working hard to stay trim.

Losing her baby weight after the birth of her second son Aiden was no exception – the model went back to exercising nine months after Aiden was born and when she had finished breastfeeding.

Just 10 weeks later, she had lost two-and-a-half inches off her waistline and had toned up – an impressive feat she credits to her new weight loss discovery, Cho Yung green tea.

Along with a balanced diet and exercise, the green tea was part of a sensible approach to weight loss. “For me, it was important to have a realistic plan that combined changes to my diet and fitness routine whilst still being achievable. I don’t think you can focus on just one area if you hope to make positive and healthy changes.”

“The first change I made was to my diet was starting to drink Cho-Yung Tea. It’s a Chinese green tea that, unlike some others, looks and tastes appealing with a mild flavour and no aftertaste. It helped me kick-start my healthy mission with the promise of weight loss if you combine it with healthy lifestyle. My slimming secret is drinking lots of fluids including Cho-Yung Tea. This helps detox the body, and Cho-Yung Tea‘s natural ingredients help me maintain my healthy lifestyle.”

Penny admits that she doesn’t want to lose as much weight as she did before, however, recognising that there can be such a thing as ‘too thin’ – a refreshing admission in today’s celeb-anorexic world.

“I was way too skinny for my height and build before I got pregnant. I was 140lbs, exactly 10 stone, before I fell pregnant with Alastair. I looked really gangly. At 160lbs, which is about 11 and a half stone, I was much better proportioned. As you get older it can be ageing if you’re too skinny.”

Now just two months before she turns 41, Penny is looking trim and gorgeous, as well as youthful.

She appreciates just how hard it is for mums like her to keep the weight off. When she was pregnant with her first boy, Alistair, she weighed 15 stone. While most of it came off with breastfeeding, she still struggled to find the energy to exercise.

“The broken nights left me feeling like I had permanent jet-lag. I certainly didn’t have any excess energy to start working out and trying to regain my pre-pregnancy figure.”

This time around, weighing 12-and-a-half stone after Aiden’s birth, she looked for a helping hand and seems to have found it in Cho Yung green tea – granted, alongside the help of a personal trainer.

She drank the tea, which works as a detox and speeds up the metabolism, alongside eating as balanced diet and working with personal trainer Gary O’Connor. Before long, she just didn’t fancy junk foods like chips and cakes anymore.

Now, she exercises three times a week for one hour in each session and isn’t ashamed to show off those pins that she is famous for. It’s well known that husband Rod, previously married to model Rachel Hunter, is a fan of leggy blondes.

Penny says: “There’s that myth that when you get to a certain age, the hemline should be lowered. But I’ve always believed it’s all to do with the figure that carries off the outfit, not the age of the person wearing it.”

She added: “Nine months after giving birth I’m very happy with my body. I’ve worked hard combining exercise and a healthy diet with drinking Cho-Yung Tea, helping me achieve my goal of regaining my pre-pregnancy body.”

It’s hard to believe that clean-living macrobiotic eating Gwyneth Paltrow needs to cleanse her system, but that’s exactly what she’s doing for the New Year – and she’s inviting readers of her lifestyle website GOOP to join her.

The star, married to Coldplay’s Chris Martin, has revealed her New Year cleanse to her readers and it’s available to buy and try for us mere mortals too.

The 21 day regime is a healthy eating plan that is low on fat and sugar. The brainchild of Dr Alejandro Junger, the cleanse, named Clean, includes protein shakes for breakfast and dinner and a lunch based on a combination of approved foods which include fruits, vegetables, salad, brown rice, butternut squash and chickpeas. It contains protein, fibre and probiotic supplements that “help give your digestive system a break and also improve energy levels by bringing in high-quality vitamins and nutrients,” according to Junger. “Best of all, because you’ll be eating during this program, you won’t be left feeling hungry or tired which is typical of most cleanses.”

According to Dr Junger, 50,000 people have done the programme so far. “I see that as a testament to how eager people are to feel better, and how effectively this cleanse works,” he said.

Fan Gwyneth says: “Next week, when it’s back to the grind with work and the daily school run, I’m starting off with Clean, my go-to cleanse from Dr Alejandro Junger. I’ve used Clean in the past with great results, losing a few pounds and kick starting a healthier and more energetic New Year.”

Anything that can make us look like Gwyneth is a bonus, but you would need to be very dedicated to take on the cleanse. You’re not allowed to eat wheat, eggs or dairy, nor drink coffee either, for 21 days. In fact, the cleanse has 77 forbidden foods on its list.

You’ll also have to shell out a pretty hefty sum as well; the cleanse certainly doesn’t come cheap at  $425 (£275).