Do you know how much I hate talking about diets? I really do. Maybe it’s because I don’t have the kind of willpower to follow Atkins or The Zone or whatever juice craze or whatever, or maybe it’s just because I think it’s a stupid subject to discuss in detail. I’m just not one of those girls who can talk about diets endlessly. But I’m not Mariah Carey. Mariah can talk about diets for a really long time. Now. She couldn’t before, because she was on fertility treatments and she had gained weight and kept it on for more than a year before she got pregnant with twins Roc & Roe. Now that she’s given birth and spent the last six months getting back into shape, and she wants to tell us all about it. She covers the new issue of Us Weekly, plus she appeared on yesterday’s Rosie O’Donnell show. There’s some mixed messaging happening here, but first, here’s Us Weekly’s cover excerpt:

“Shake It Off,” indeed! Six months after welcoming twins Moroccan and Monroe, Mariah Carey has lost 30 pounds — and shows off her toned legs and flat stomach in size-6 short-shorts on the stunning new cover of Us Weekly, out now.

“I gained an enormous amount of weight,” the Grammy-winner superstar tells Us of welcoming her son and daughter April 30 with hubby Nick Cannon. How’d she slim down? Beginning in July, Carey buckled down with a nutritionist and a workout plan from Jenny (formerly Jenny Craig), keeping to a 1,500-calorie-a-day menu and thrice-weekly workouts.

“I feel incredible,” the “Fly Like a Bird” singer tells Us, three months after her body transformation began. She and Cannon, 31, famously struggled to conceive their twins (born via C-section at 35 weeks) after a heartbreaking miscarriage.

“It was a huge blessing to be able to have the babies,” Carey says, “But I felt trapped in my body because I couldn’t move.”

Adds the once-again svelte star: “I’m proud of how hard I worked to get my body back…I had to do this for me.”

[From Us Weekly]

30 pounds? I love Mariah, but bitch please. She’s lost a lot more than 30 pounds, because I remember how heavy she was before and during her pregnancy. Mariah kind of knows it too, because she changed the number when she was on Rosie’s show, although she has a good reason – she had edema, and she claims she had 40 pounds of water weight.

Mariah Carey wasn’t shy about showing off her baby bump when she was pregnant with now-6-month-old twins Moroccan and Monroe Cannon. And now, she’s positively ecstatic about unveiling her hot new post-baby body after losing, she says, a full 70 lbs.

On Tuesday’s episode of The Rosie Show on OWN, Carey, 42, was lowered diva-style onto the stage riding on a crescent moon and wearing a skin-tight black mini-skirt and cleavage-baring leather jacket. She then explained her new physique was courtesy of a strict diet and exercise – along with the loss of what she says is about 40 lbs. of water due to a difficult pregnancy.

“In the beginning, when I first had the babies, I had so much edema … water and swelling. Most pregnant woman have that just in their feet,” Carey says. “One day I was doing my thank-you notes and I noticed it started rising up the leg, so I had edema. … I didn’t think I would ever be the same person.”

Diet Plan Spokeswoman
Once she’d shed the water weight, Carey embarked on the Jenny diet plan (formerly Jenny Craig), for which she now serves as a spokeswoman.

“The first week, I lost 40 lbs. … of just water,” Carey says. “It was just water, initially. When I started with the program, I lost at least 30 lbs. of weight that needed to be lost.”

And, says Carey, it wasn’t all about appearance. Carrying so much extra weight made everyday tasks, including going to the bathroom, a challenge.

“I had a really tough pregnancy,” she says. “I was supposed to be on bed rest, but it was so bad that even bed hurt. … I learned a lot being pregnant, watching my body change.” She adds, “The whole point of this is not just like: ‘Oh, hey, look at me and my weight loss, I’m fantastic.’ It’s really health. Like I said, I learned it when I became helpless and felt so vulnerable like never before in my life.”

How She Did It
Because she had a Cesarean section, Carey says exercise wasn’t an option early on. So, she says, “The diet is 90 percent of it.” Remembering to eat was one of her biggest challenges because, she says, she believes if she goes too long without refueling, “You slow down your metabolism.”

For her, it was important “being able to just grab something. I like the soups a lot. It’s 50 calories. I gotta say I like the snacks too.”

Carey also regained her fitness by exercising with her dogs and doing workouts in the ocean. One thing she won’t stick with once she meets her goal.

“I never weighed myself,” she explains. “People will think I’m a liar but it’s true. This is another cliché phrase, I’m a big boned girl … I’m tall and so I always weigh more.”

Instead of weighing herself, she says, “I would tend to go, ‘Does this size dress fit me that I wore three years ago? I’m good, let’s go.’ I would go by what it looked like, how I felt.”

[From People]

OK, she sounds healthy. I like that Mariah’s not too fancy to do Jenny Craig, but I still think there are some funny numbers going on with the actual weight loss versus water retention. Also: you know how I hate to talk about medical stuff because I can actually feel that stuff happening to me because I’m such a crazy hypochondriac and an easy mark for the power of medical persuasion? Well, I looked up Edema (here) and it sounds way more serious than what Mariah is talking about. It’s a serious medical condition, not just something you pee out in a week. In any case, I think Mariah probably has lost close to 70 pounds in total, but I don’t buy her breakdown of regular weight to water weight. And I love that she doesn’t weight herself either – neither do I, because, in my mind, my mega-boobs always skew the number. Shut up.

Here are some pics of Mariah before and during her pregnancy.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame & Dembabies.com.