Maria Menounos says she gained six pounds on Dancing With the Stars. (David Livingston/Getty Images)If you know anything about "Dancing With the Stars," you know that every season there's at least one contestant who ends her stint on the dance competition show significantly slimmer and then goes on to tout the weight-loss benefits of the daily rehearsals (often described as "grueling") and the encouragement of her professional dance partner (often described as "amazing" ). Kelly Osbourne, Kirstie Alley, and Kendra Wilkinson have all gotten a bonus burst of fame for revealing their dance-induced slimdowns in the media.
This time around, in the show's low-rated Season 14, former sitcom star Jaleel White has said that he dropped 13 pounds thanks to all that boogying, while former "Little House on the Prairie" star Melissa Gilbert insists that she started the show as a size 6, and was down to a size 2 by the time she was eliminated earlier this month. (Cue the yawns.) But one celebrity participant — entertainment reporter Maria Menounos, who got the boot the week after Gilbert — admits she had very different experience: She actually gained weight thanks to the dance floor.
"I actually got on the scale because I get so curious now — I never really weighed myself — but I gained about six pounds since I've started, she recently told OK! Magazine. But the slim and trim Menounos isn't all that concerned, since muscle weighs more than fat, after all. "It's all muscle. I'm super lean, and super tight. Dancing's an overall body workout, so it's pretty cool," she said in the interview, insisting she doesn't care what size she is. "I don't want to lose my curves. I certainly don't want to lose my butt," Derek [Hough, her pro partner] made a comment the other day like, 'I think you're losing your butt.' I was like, 'I am?!' He was like, 'No, I'm just kidding.'"
Maria with her dance partner, Derek Hough. (Adam Taylor/ABC)
With her derriere firmly intact, the 33-year-old insists she will keep on dancing. "I told Derek I will be stalking him for the rest of his life, and I will be asking him to dance all the time."
The brunette beauty wasn't always this fit. Though photos seem to be hard to come by, Menounos has admitted that she fell victim to college weight-gain … but it was far worse than the old "Freshman 15." She actually packed on a whopping 40 pounds thanks to overeating mostly bad-for-you foods. When she was a size 14, she hired a trainer for just one session, who helped her put a daily circuit workout together. She also began slowly cutting back her food intake, rather than attempting more diets that were bound to fail. "I decided enough was enough. Depriving myself didn't work because, yeah, I'd resist a craving one night, but then it'd come back the next day and it'd be worse," she told Fitness magazine in 2008. "I did it on my own, when I was dirt-poor, and I've kept it off."
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