Maria Menounos, beautiful host of Extra, has recently appeared on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal. She tells them about how she lost forty pounds in a year. Forty pounds! That is nearly the size of a toddler or approximately four Maru cats, for reference.

Menounos told LHJ that she did, in fact, grow up in a health-centered home. Her family stayed away from processed sugar. “I didn’t even know what bagels or waffles were until late in high school,” she told them. Dessert usually consisted of fruit.

However, when she started working in a doughnut shop at 13, everything changed. She gained weight every year, putting on more than forty pounds throughout high school and college. Without her family’s diabetes-guided diet (her father has Type 1), she started eating more and more chips, candy, and otherwise unhealthy food. “I felt sick and lethargic,” she told LHJ. That’s no fun at all!

Fortunately, post-college, Menounos snapped back to her roots. She started loading up her diet with healthy Greek yogurt, not surprising considering her Greek heritage. She also loaded up on filling watermelon, protein-filled eggs, and nutrient-rich kale. And, of course, chocolate! Never cut dessert, she says, and that is a sentiment we can all get behind. She recommends keeping track of diet and exercise, setting weight loss goals, and makes sure to consume calories in a healthy way, i.e. not in a shot glass. She also recommends combining vodka with soda water and lime, if one must drink, not with sugary juice or sodas.

She does, however, stay away from the scale. Judge by looseness of clothes, not pounds, unless you are severely tempted.

And, she reminds E!, thinner does not equal healthier.

The part-time professional wrestler’s advice is, really, perfectly reasonable and can give hope to many looking to lose as little as five or as many as forty pounds.

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