Mariah Carey’s Extreme Weight Loss

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 of welcoming her son and daughter April 30 with hubby Nick Cannon.

Mariah Carey

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Mariah Carey Weight Loss: Before and After

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Mariah before (left) and after (right).

GQ

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.

Mariah Carey Workout Plan

Critics Choice Awards

“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.”

Carey told that she had gained 70 pounds, an “enormous amount of weight.” She decided to start working with Jenny Craig after she started feeling “trapped in her body,” because she couldn’t move. So just how did Carey get in shape so quickly?

Mariah Carey rocks 45 pound weight loss

UNICEF

 As part of the Jenny Craig program, Carey says she met with a nutritionist to decide how many calories she should be eating per day and stuck to a 1,500 calorie diet. She also made sure to eat small meals every few hours.

She worked out three times per week. Because Carey had a cesarean section, initially exercise wasn’t a part of her regime. “Diet was 90 percent of it,” she told Rosie O’Donnell on the The Rosie Show. But once she was able to add exercise back into her schedule, she started taking long walks with her dogs. Carey has long been a fan of water workouts, so we’re not surprised to hear her say that she also started working out in the ocean to help lose her baby weight.

She didn’t weigh herself. Instead of going by the scale, Carey says she would go by how things felt. “Does this dress fit better than it did three years ago? Then I’d be like, ‘Ok, I’m good!'” she told Rosie.

“In the before pictures, it appears that Mariah may be anywhere between 160-165 pounds. With a voluptuous figure, it’s easy to look bigger than you are. In the after photos, Carey appears to have lost between 15-20 pounds,” the fitness coach added.