| LOSING IT |
 Want To Look Like The Stars? Here's How!By Stephanie Sloane and Elaine G. Flores Soap Opera Digest March 2, 2004 Judi Evans [Bonnie, DAYS] "I gained weight for this role," laughs Judi Evans. "The original breakdown said 'heavyset,' so I was cramming weight on because I didn't want to lose out for being too thin. It's nice to be in a role where it's not necessarily, 'Oh, God, she's stacked, racked and really hard packed!' " Now, Evans would like to drop about 15 pounds. "I am not making myself crazy about it, but I'm trying. It's a vicious circle." Prior to joining DAYS, Evans spent years taking off the 50-plus pounds she put on during her pregnancy with son Austin that brought her up to a size 18. At the time, the actress was playing Paulina on ANOTHER WORLD, and the show wrote the weight gain into the storyline. For Evans, it was a relief. "It helped a lot," she recalls. "I didn't have to feel as pressured to lose a lot of weight really fast because it was in the story. If I lost weight, great; if not, it was still the story. It's so weird because the mental thing for me is when I was heavier, in my mind, I saw a smaller girl. The smaller I got in my mind, the bigger the girl got. Sometimes, I felt I just wanted to kill myself. I couldn't take it. I let it get away from me and it was so hard to get back from that." Eventually, Evans found and stuck to a diet and exercise plan that worked for her. "It comes off a lot slower than it goes on," she laughs. "It was nine months on and four years to come off. I changed my diet and I exercised. When I was pregnant, for the first four months I had a lot of back trouble. I was tired and hungry. And I stopped smoking. All I did was eat and sleep, so the weight went on pretty fast. I had a C-section and when you go back to exercise, it's totally different. You have to get past the scars of five layers of muscle being cut. I would prefer if it had come off faster, but there's no healthy way to do that. You have to be really committed and keep at it. Just getting out and walking, throwing a Frisbee, running around with your kid or riding a bike a couple of times a week will help. It's as easy at that. You don't have to go to the gym." The battle of the bulge is nothing new to Evans. "I always have struggled with it in one way or the other," she nods. "I am 5-foot-4 and I have a very short waist and from the time I was 11½, big boobs. In person, I tend to look smaller, but when you're short-waisted on television, you mostly get bust shots. Plus, if I gain half a pound or more, it goes right in my tummy." The actress says she has on occasion felt pressure to lose weight. "Not necessarily by higher-ups," she explains, "but by colleagues or people in other departments. On DAYS, no. It's a very different experience. Not that anything was bad or negative; there's just a huge amount of respect for everyone at DAYS. Plus, the kind of character I play and the age I am is a factor in that I don't have to be the 'perfect' size." Like Sweeney, Evans has had some memorable fan encounters. "A lot of times people come up to me and say, 'Wow, you look so much fatter on TV,' and I think, 'Oh, is that a compliment?' And me, the idiot, says, 'Thank you!' It's funny, because I live in suburbia, so when I walk around at home, I'm like, 'I'm so hot!' Then, I come to work and I think, I'm huge!' Everyone here is so small." Evans says the most important lesson she has learned is acceptance. "I have come to terms with being a little heavy. Now it's, 'Well, how can I feel good about myself this way and make myself feel sexy?' There are a lot of people who don't find skinny attractive and like voluptuous, curvy women. It doesn't matter what size you are. You have to accentuate the positive." #
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