Jennifer Aydin will be sporting a slimmer look when she returns to the small screen.
“Obviously seeing yourself on camera always helps motivate you,” “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” star, 42, recently told Page Six. “I was really big on top, meaning my breasts were large, and I hated them. They were like these big melons. They were mushy from breastfeeding five kids and it started off with having the breast reduction. So that’s what I did first.”
Jennifer’s transformation started with going under the knife. Her husband, plastic surgeon Dr. Bill Aydin, performed a breast reduction, breast lift and liposuction on the reality star, which resulted in a 15-pound weight loss.
“It was just breast reduction and lift with implant. So then I got down a few notches with that and then I had liposuction in my back. My husband contoured my back and gave me shape. I lost about three and a half pounds of fat from my back and it contoured me. Then I was like, ‘Wow! I’m looking smaller and smaller, I got the small boobs, I got this hourglass figure, now I wanna lose some weight.'”
She noted that the liposuction “is really not a weight-loss solution” but that it “helps in your problem areas.”
Soon after, Jennifer found herself getting a kickstart from an unlikely place.
“I was stalking Teresa [Giudice]‘s Instagram and I saw how amazing Milania looked, and they kept tagging their nutritionist [Absolute Nutrition Counseling],” she said. “I contacted them and they came over to my house over with their colleague who is the chef that prepares your meals. They basically work together calculating my macros, and how many calories I’m gonna have every day.”
She lost another 10 pounds by following Absolute Nutrition Counseling’s recommended diet and having her food delivered to her door. She added exercising to her routine just a month ago.
“It’s a work in progress,” Jennifer said. “I’ll have a week where a few dinners where we go out to dinner and going out to dinner is part of my demise. I see it coming right on right away. So then I stop for a second, I’m like, ‘Okay, I gotta calm down. We gotta make some better choices, and I gotta get back on the bandwagon.'”
Jennifer and Bill recently took a family trip to the Bahamas and her self-control was put to the test.
“I brought my oatmeal with me and I would make oatmeal for myself after the gym in the morning. Our routine was going to work out every morning, then going to Starbucks … I was having a healthy breakfast, a light lunch and then, of course, we were going to dinner. And you know what, I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to deprive myself. If I wanna piece of bread, I’m gonna have a piece of bread.”
And while she may never take after Giudice and enter a bodybuilding competition — she told us “that wouldn’t even bring [her] joy” — she isn’t opposed to getting some help from Dolores and Frank Catania.
“She’s very generous,” Jennifer said. “I saw [Dolores] and she was like, ‘You know I have a gym in Teterboro, you can come work out with me anytime you want,'” she said.
Now she’s getting ready to go to Turkey for her brother’s wedding and helping her mom move into a new home in New Jersey. And nothing can get Jennifer down, with her cheerfully telling us, “New chapters. New beginnings!”
The story originally appeared in the New York Post.