'Dancing' helps Kirstie Alley slim down

Kirstie Alley is in the news again - she's been on Dancing With the Stars (a show I don't watch, admittedly,) and apparently she's half her size.

And that's great news! I'm very happy for her.

But I seem to recall that she had lost weight before...on Nutrisystem or Jenny Craig or something, and had gained it all back. So I hope that she has at last found the secret of maintaining her weight loss - which means she can't go back to her old style of living, but must maintain the style that enabled her to lose weight in the first place.

As a wealthy actress, this would seem to be easy. She's got the wherewithal to go to a dance class every other day for two hours, have fun and keep her body toned, and have a cook who can make her good, and healthy, meals.

For those of us who don't have that much money, planning is everything. We must make time for our dancing - or are biking or are walking or tennis, whatever are exercise/sport of choice is, and we have to cook our own meals - although we can do that in advance, cook up a batch of stuff on one day and freeze it for subsequent days. (I have always found that food tastes better the second day, or even the third day... the spices or what have you have had time to marinate through the dish...)

Anyway, congrats to Kirstie Alley, and sincere wishes that her new look remains her look...

And apprehension, of course. How quickly the media will turn on her if she dares to gain back five pounds or so...

Stargazing | ‘Dancing’ helps Kirstie Alley slim down

Thirty-eight inches. That’s how many Kirstie Alley has shed on “Dancing With the Stars” this season.

That’s how much the show’s costumers had to take in the cha-cha costume she wore in her first dance so she could wear it on the season finale Tuesday.

Kirstie has been coy about how many pounds she has lost.

“There will be some reveal of that at some point, but I really didn’t care,” she says. “As long as I kept changing and changing and changing, I really didn’t care. It was like, keep whittling, whittling, whittling. And the other thing that’s really more significant to me — I mean, I love the whittling, I like being skinny — I’m really strong and really agile, and it gave me a new life.”

The show’s costume designer, Randall Christensen, says that her costumes kept getting smaller and smaller as the show went on. “Isn’t she looking incredible?” he says.

Stargazing says: Yes!