The hilarious comedian and actress Margaret Cho stars in Lifetime’s, Drop Dead Diva.  Recently, Margaret told OK! Magazine that after years of struggling with her weight and body image issues she is now content with who she is.

“I feel good about myself.  I didn’t really count, like I didn’t really purposely go out to lose weight. It’s something that happened naturally to my body over time — I think mostly by becoming a healthier person and not obsessively dieting and working out and being overly conscious of how I looked all the time in that regard. I think also the way that people are in my family, the women tend to lose weight when they get older, so that was a genetic advantage that I had in that regard. But I feel good about myself now in a way that’s not punishing and in a way that I’m healthy. It’s good.”

The 40-year-old burned off the pounds by doing belly dancing and plenty of regular dancing.  She explained,

“Music is always on, so there’s always a time to dance,” she says. “That probably contributed to my weight loss. I dance a lot, and I dance a lot at home. I do some gym stuff, but not that much. I’ve been to Egypt to study belly dance and I don’t dance professionally or publicly anymore, but I still really love it.”

The comedian also explained that over the years she wasn’t kind to her body because of her obsession to be thin, but now that she is older and wiser she hopes that she can help other women by being a good example.

“The great mistake is that I didn’t treat myself with respect when I was younger,” she says. “I was very obsessive as a dieter and I thought being thin was the answer to all of my problems and so I wrecked my health in order to become thin. This obsession landed me in the hospital with kidney problems and health problems, which still affect me to this day. I have some problems relating to my anorexia in my early to mid twenties and, you know, I’m 40. These problems will not go away and will probably stay with me for the rest of my life so those are the biggest mistakes. Those are the mistakes I would love to prevent other younger women from going through. Talking about my struggle and my issues there, I think helps people, or at least its another, a different, voice out there, one that’s not so self-depreciating and not so much about punishing ourselves for feeling overweight or being overweight or whatever – but about celebrating who we are.”

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Margaret Cho has been super busy these days. She’s lost 40 pounds and can be seen on her new reality series on VHI The Cho Show. She’s tried a slew of diets – the raw diet, the macrobiotic diet, the fruits only diet – and a diet so extreme that it caused her to be hospitalized with kidney failure. Despite this she says “I was still fat.” Margaret reveals how she lost the weight on the “whatever” diet…

Margaret Cho’s “Whatever” Diet
Starting in 2003, shes ate “whatever” – pizza, french fries… whatever! And since then has managed to lose 40 pounds. She eats anything including “ice cream, chips, everything.”

When I was on crazy diets, I’d gain weight because I would binge on diet food! I learned that any restriction on the kind of food I was eating was going to be problem. By saying I can eat whatever I want, I don’t crave it as much

She’s ditched the spinning classes for belly dancing classes. She’s also developed a positive mindset “I don’t trip about the number that is on the inside of my clothes.”

Margaret’s tips on losing weight on “whatever”
1. She eats “only when I’m hungry.”
2. Her big meals are breakfast and lunch. She opts for a small dinner at 4 pm

Margaret looks great and she illustrates that you can lose weight any number of ways. For her, she learned to have the foods she loved and still lose weight by eating consciously (when she was hungry), avoiding late night snacking and practicing portion control. As far as the diet the put her in the hospital… it’s probably a “detox” fasting diet I talked about earlier.

Do you think you can lose weight the “whatever” way?

You can follow Margaret on her blog.

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