Jennifer Hudson was in denial.
She knew she wasn’t thin, but she didn’t consider herself overweight, either.
And then at a glittering red-carpet event in 2007, when she won a supporting-actress Oscar for Dreamgirls, she got a stinging wake-up call. A reporter asked how she felt about being “a big girl in Hollywood.”
“It was a complete shock,” says Hudson, 30. “Where I come from, Chicago, I was a normal-size girl. She was talking to me about being a bigger girl and I was like, ‘I am?’ ” Suddenly, for the first time in her life, “I felt insecure about my size.”
She looked like everyone else in her family. Wearing a size 16, she was content and comfortable in her own skin. “I didn’t ever say, ‘I hate my body.’ I really liked myself, and that’s why my mind has still not caught up to my new body.”
Fast-forward to the present. One Oscar, a Grammy, a devastating family tragedy (her mother, brother and nephew were murdered in 2008), a hiatus from the spotlight, the birth of a baby boy, and finally, her second album, I Remember Me, just released this week, and Hudson is still in shock. But this time, it’s for a far different reason.
After virtually dropping out of sight for years, she has emerged radiant, invigorated and, she says, incredulous at the new her.
“I have passed over from one side to the other,” says Hudson, now 80 pounds lighter, a 5-foot-9 Venus with big bold eyes and a sweet smile. “I am somewhere I never thought I would be. I look at myself in the mirror and I say, ‘Is that you?’ ”
Relaxing on a sofa in a sun-dappled living room in a house high in the hills of Bel Air, Hudson practically glows in a clingy coral one-shouldered size 4 dress. She clearly is a different person, exuding the confidence that spells star power.
Hudson says she now knows her weight was holding her back.
“I didn’t even realize I was being discriminated against and missed out on things until I crossed over to the other side,” she says. “Now, on this side, they treat you differently, the opportunities are different, my image is different, even though some people do say, ‘I like the fat Jennifer better.’ ”
Her biggest “aha” moment came at the end of her pregnancy, when she let down her guard, ate anything she wanted and gave in to her cravings for tacos, burritos and pizza. She gained 60 pounds.
“I said, ‘Dang, I want my body back,’ ” she recalls. Five days after David was born on Aug. 8, 2009, Hudson started to exercise — slowly at first, because her son was delivered by C-section. She and her fiancé, David Otunga, who she says is always supportive of her new life, simply took a short walk.
Hollywood didn’t come calling, but Weight Watchers did. A year later, in August 2010, she had a contract to be the company’s spokeswoman.
Hudson is the first to admit it hasn’t been easy.
At the beginning, she did not want to stick with the plan.By the end of the third week she actually had gained weight. Finally, with some coaxing, she made the decision to follow the rules — for a week.
“It was like lightning,” Hudson says. “Wow. It really worked — it gave me control. I gave up the diet mentality. Who can eat baked chicken and brown rice for the rest of her life?”
She sought out other dieters for moral support and to see how they were keeping off the pounds.
Then, after losing 40 pounds, she hit a plateau. “I got stuck at 190 pounds,” she says. But she powered on. “I had been at 190 pounds before and never could get any lower. I decided to just keep doing what I had been doing, and it worked.”
Soon 75 friends and family joined her effort. Together they’ve lost nearly 2,000 pounds.
So how has she done it? She has a disciplined but flexible eating plan. For instance, she usually eats egg whites and turkey bacon or salmon for breakfast, but some days she has a chocolate bar. She likes chicken with peppers for lunch, her biggest meal of the day. Dinner is always something simple, like a salad.
Her favorite meal to cook is turkey wings, with greens and sweet potatoes.
She weighs herself every day, Hudson explains, as David totters into the room, crawls across a coffee table and plops onto his mother’s lap. The two are bonded in many ways, including the food they eat. She loves bananas and so does he; she doesn’t eat fried chicken and never allows him to.
“My son has never had fried food,” she declares proudly. “We don’t give him sweets.”
That’s worlds apart, she explains, from her childhood. “I had to be an adult before I learned all of this. I remember my granddaddy used to walk us to the store every day, and we would come back with bags and bags of chips and it seemed like the whole candy store and bags of cookies.”
She’s aggressively self-protective in restaurants, often asking to go to the kitchen to talk to the chef about how much butter or fat is in the meal.
Hudson says the key ingredient to her success is record-keeping; she writes down everything she eats and sticks to her daily allotment of food.
And, of course, she exercises now. “If you get up off the couch and do something, it is better than nothing.” Her warm-weather “somethings” include running, jumping rope and playing basketball with her cousins. She even considers trying clothes on in the morning part of her workout because, she smiles slyly, “you are bending over.”
So far, so great for Hudson, who will go on tour this summer. “This is the new me,” she says, adding with a big grin: “I now think of myself as a supermodel.” Now that is worth giving up chips and fried chicken for.