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No wonder then that, as she reflects on what it took to go from 219 to 148 lbs., Alley insists, "If I can do it, anybody can." A year and a half after signing on as a pitchwoman for Jenny Craig, Alley eats about 1,500 calories a day, mostly from the company's portion-controlled meals, and weighs in weekly with a Jenny Craig consultant (services any non-celebrity client would get, though she receives them for free). "So many women come up to me and say, 'Well, if I had a chef and a personal trainer and all those perks you have, I could have lost the weight too,'" says Alley incredulously. "I want to go on the record and say, I don't have a trainer or a chef!"
In addition she's opposed to (and contractually forbidden to get) plastic surgery, including liposuction – which made her announcement that she plans to lose another 15 lbs. and appear on Oprah in November wearing a bikini all the more jaw-dropping. "I'd like to prove to myself and maybe other women my age that there can still be good years ahead of us," she explains, "maybe even the best." Still, she admits it's a bold move. "At my age, can you really turn your body into a bikini body without having surgery?" she wonders. "This is an experiment!"
One that she wouldn't have agreed to if not for the support of her children, who saw her get slammed by the tabloids for putting on weight ("It was upsetting to them; they are very protective of me," she says), then watched as she laughed back in her Fat Actress series and later saw Mom become the public face of a commercial weight-loss company, which required that she lose 65 lbs. Then, of course, came the bikini challenge. "I said to my kids, 'Can I do this? Will I embarrass you?'" she recalls. "They were laughing about it."
