Soap Opera Digest
March 2, 2004
Losing It

Want to Look Like the Stars? Here’s How!

Every woman wants to look good and feel good about herself, but for most of us, that doesn’t mean having to be a size 4. Most soap actresses, however, do face pressure to stay that slim. Not only do they have millions of critical eyes on them, but they know that the camera adds 10 pounds! Three actresses who lost a lot of weight reveal how they won the battle of the bulge.

Alison Sweeney (Sami, DAYS)

Catherine Hickland (Lindsay, OLTL)

Catherine Hickland is among soaps’ most glamorous women, but like many of us, she had to deal with an expanding… and expanding… and expanding waistline. “First of all, I just want to make a statement about being overweight,” she begins. “This is a very personal thing: If a person is overweight and they are okay with themselves, that is a beautiful thing.”

That said, Hickland notes, “That was not my feeling about myself. I have always struggled with my weight. I really feel best when I’m a size 4 or 6. I had gotten up to a 10 and I was bordering on a 12.”

As the pounds piled on, Hickland was too busy to notice. “I was working all the time, I didn’t have the energy to go to the gym and, may I add, I hated going to the gym,” she declares. “Then I was eating whatever I could get my hands on because I was in the studio all day and night. I didn’t really mean for it to get out of hand, but nobody does.”

Hickland’s defining moment came when she “couldn’t wear my jeans, and I live in my blue jeans. I put my sweats on and I just looked horrible, I looked frumpy, I thought, ‘You know, this has just gone far enough.’ I did not get any pressure from anybody, but I found myself envying people who looked great in a pair of blue jeans. I had an epiphany: ‘My God, I could train myself to sing well enough to be in the greatest Broadway musical of all time, I can start a company from scratch out of my dressing room on a computer and built it to what it is today, I can come from a small town and have my dream of being an actor working in that chosen profession my whole life and I can’t get a hold of my weight? Are you kidding me?!’”

Before she could change her body, the actress had to change her mind-set. “I began to really look into not what I was eating, but what was eating me,” she explains. “I realized I was an emotional eater. And then I decided that I was going to find a program that worked for me. That’s important – if you try to do something that doesn’t work for your mental way of looking at food, then you are going to fail. I tried them all – I tried Weight Watchers, not enough food for the Kitty Cat. It’s scary when all you think about is your next meal. It’s a great, great program, but it didn’t work for me because it didn’t have enough food for me. Then, I tried Atkins, but I can’t live without carbohydrates. Again, I was obsessing over my next meal – and what wasn’t going to be in it. And then I got onto the Somersizing.”

The plan helped Hickland deal with her weakness: a sweet tooth. “You have to give up sugar, which for me, desserts are a food group and the thought of that was just unbearable. Suzanne Somers gives you recipes. She shows you how to make a sugar-free cheesecake, you can buy her chocolate bars that are sugar-free and all that. I went on her diet and it was very successful for me. I lost 25 pounds.”

But it wasn’t over there. Hickland says, “Then, I had to flip the switch in my head about working out. I got the weight off first, because I was too embarrassed to go into a gym; I just felt schlumpy.” She suggests, “If you can do just the treadmill while you’re dieting, it’s good, it speeds up the process. I decided I was going to love going to the gym. It was going to be part of my day that was for me.”

Hickland employed plenty of visualization. “I imagined my body in a different way. I pictured my body in a pair of little jeans with my ass looking really fine in them. I imagined that I would buy a bikini and go to the beach. I imagined myself looking great on TV and people going, “Hey, how’d you do that?’ So, I could say, ‘Well, I did it like this and you can, too!’ It has to be mind, body, spirit – you can’t have any change in your life if you don’t have those three things working.”

Hickland’s encouragement for others who want to get slim is: “Look in the mirror and tell yourself that though you love yourself, you want to change the things that are making you feel bad. In the beginning of my journey, I was not so gently and kind with myself. I looked in the mirror and said, “You have to give up the desserts, you big old hog.’ That’s how I talked to myself and I don’t talk to myself that way now. The minute I started to speak to myself in a loving way and visualizing and journaling and writing about my feelings, I began to get some results. And don’t be in a hurry about it. Tackle one thing at a time. If you fall down, that’s all right, dust yourself off and start over.”

Judi Evans (Bonnie, DAYS)