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Three months after she started sending up her girth on her semi-reality series Fat Actress, Alley committed to paring it down by signing a paid endorsement deal with Jenny Craig. Four dress sizes later, "I am," declares Alley, "the Jenny Craig evangelist!" She began her presentation at the Pierre by karate-kicking a life-size cutout of herself at over 200 lbs. "I’m never going to go there ever again," she says resolutely.
How did she get there in the first place? Alley herself is a little mystified. Through a deep-fried-and-gravied girlhood in Wichita, Kans., she rarely carried an extra pound on her 5'8" frame. "I ate a lot," she recalls. "But I was swimming all day long." After becoming an actress, she stayed svelte. "Let’s face it," she says with a laugh. "I had a free ride for a long time on the ol’ weight train."
Then something changed. "Around age 45, I couldn’t eat huge quantities of food without gaining weight," she says.
By then Alley had become a mother to Lillie, now 11, and William, 12. "I wanted to be the ideal mom. I’d be cooking and had to taste everything 50 times." That habit took its toll after her second series, Veronica’s Closet, went off the air in 2000.
But Alley dismissed each 10-lb. gain, thinking, "Who wants to be Paris Hilton anyway?" She still ate as if she possessed a teenager’s metabolism. "I’d hit Chili’s and have that Awesome Blossom – that giant fried onion – then chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and chicken wings; like 7,000 calories at one meal!"
