Hayley,
I just saw pictures of Janet Jackson and she looks great. I am a young 53, and struggle like hell to lose 50lbs. What are some of these celebrities doing in order to lose weight so fast? She had a child and was somewhat larger even before that. Now, she is back to looking like she did in her 20's!!
What gives?
Thank you
R
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What gives is that she worked her ass off. Literally. She has the means to dedicate everything to looking amazing but even with all of the resources that money can buy, she put in hours and hours of hard work.
I have been in this industry a long time, and a fan of Janet’s for longer, and I have seen both her and my clients struggle to find balance in their life and a body that they can love. The benefit that my clients have over celebrities is that they are not being judged by millions of fans all over the world. Celebrities often have no choice but to look, and be, perfect. Their careers depend on more than just how talented they are and for someone like Janet Jackson, who has spent most of her career as an extremely fit and sexy performer, she wants to look the part.
There is no magic answer as to what these celebrities are doing to lose weight. They are restricting calories, they are working out hours a day and they have made weight loss their priority. However, in reality they are not really losing weight that much quicker than us regular people. Let’s think about how much time has actually passed since her son was born, which is about seven months. In real life, seven months postpartum is barely enough time for mothers to figure out how to get out of the house showered, but for people in the celebrity world, seven months can accomplish a lot. Even if she was only losing the recommended 1-2 pounds a week, in seven months that is 28 to 56 lbs. This seems like fast weight loss to us because we are not looking at her every single day. We see the before and we see the after but what we don’t see are all of the sweaty days in between.
I am going to leave you with this story. A few years back I was working with a client who had “struggled” for years to lose 50 pounds. She was always looking for the easy way to do it, the quick fix or the fad diet. Sure, for two weeks she would work hard and focus. She would eat what the diet prescribed and do the exercises she was told to do but then something would come up like a party or a vacation and the hard work and dedication would stop. A few weeks would pass then she would get back on the workout wagon but she would be starting from scratch. This pattern would repeat itself month after month, year after year which resulted in her “struggle”.
When she and I started working together we changed that. I had her take a realistic look at the life she was living and had her ask herself was she really struggling to lose weight. What about all those forgotten glasses of wine or over-indulgent Saturday nights? She would then ask, “Why does everyone else lose weight so quickly except me?” and I would explain to her that they don’t. They work hard and they focus but they live a life that they can sustain. They don’t try and lose 15 pounds in a month but rather 6 or 8 pounds. It just seems fast for us because we don’t notice the in-between.
Whatever you have been doing to lose weight is not working so you need to switch your game. You need to create a new plan, a plan that you can follow. You need to stop ignoring those “bad choices” and learn to make those choices less. You don’t have to give up everything but you can’t have it all, all the time.
Set a goal of 5 pounds a month for the next 10 months and hold yourself accountable to that. If the weight stops coming off then you need to change something but there is no easy way or magic answer. It takes time and it takes work.
