So… this happened:
Janet Jackson is in control.
The 45-year-old singer, now the new face for the Nutrisystem diet, told “Good Morning America” that her body image issues started when her brother, late pop idol Michael Jackson, teased her about her weight.
She wrote in her book “True You: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself” that her brother liked to makes jokes about “her butt being too big.”
“Being the baby of the family, you get teased,” she said. “I carried that through my adult life.”
Upon joining the cast of the 1970s comedy “Good Times,” the wardrobe woman told her that they would have to bind her chest because her bust was developing too rapidly.
The next season, she was told to lose weight.
She admitted that her yo-yoing weight was due to seeking comfort in ice cream, chips and cookies when she was feeling down.
“Sometimes even healthy food,” she said. “But too much.”
Jackson said that even when flaunting those enviable abdominal muscles on album covers and in videos, she still felt bad about how she looked.
“I could very easily pick myself apart,” she said. “That’s what I did.”
Her lifelong struggle with food and self-loathing has inspired her help others, she said, and is one of the reasons she chose to work with Nutrisystem.
“It’s a matter of maintenance and keeping the weight off,” she said. “My success plan was to feel good about myself and be healthy.”
And….well… I just don’t know.
I guess we’re supposed to presume that this body:
…comes from eating this:
???????
Once I saw this, I immediately thought back to Denene at MyBrownBaby, who wrote the following:
Years ago when she had a new album out and was still in love with Jermaine Dupri and her brother Michael was still in the land of the living, I interviewed Janet Jackson for a feature story in Essence. On stage and in magazines she’s an absolute glamour doll but let me tell you this: in person, Janet, sans the stage make-up, perfectly-coiffed hair and uber sexy, body-skimming costume, is breathtakingly stunning. With a body that makes you want to quit food, eat air, buy lifetime stock in Spanx and spend every waking moment in somebody’s gym.
But by the second day of our interview—this time at her posh apartment overlooking Central Park—I confirmed what I’d always suspected about Janet and other celebrities famous not just for their talent but their beautiful bodies: They look the way they do—“perfect”—because they pay people to keep them that way. Sure, celebrities have to have some level of commitment in watching what they eat and exercising, but Janet admitted that she hated working out and employed a full-time trainer whose sole job it was to literally drag her out of bed and make her exercise. She acknowledged, too, that she had a nutritionist and chef on hand to design and prepare all her meals and snacks—a revelation punctuated by a dude who was on hand to personally give her milkshakes and vitamins practically every hour during our two-day interview.
Just…. that’s just something to think about when you see thse commercials for Mariah/Janet/Jessica Simpson hawking their prospective products. Not that Janet’s body is unattainable – it is – but that it’s hard freaking work, so hard that she’s employed a staff to help her accomplish it. If you think she got it by eating Nutrisystem – because, let’s face it, the idea is that you’ll think back to “in-season” Janet, not just Janet-in-the-commercials – then you’ll be sorely mistaken.