Kirstie, Valerie and Jenny

Did you see that Kirstie Alley and Valerie Bertinelli are back together as "ambassadors" for Jenny Craig?

Yup. (I saw it on ET just now, so it must be true!)

Both women were successful in losing weight with Jenny in the past and both have regained some of those pounds. Valerie went so far as to say she felt "shame" in gaining.

Here's what I think about it all:

1. It's freaking hard to lose weight. And if you manage to lose it, it's harder to keep it off. Old habits sneak back in. We get lazy. We don't gain 10 pounds after eating pizza and cake every now and then, so we eat pizza and cake next week. And the week after. And then we add ice cream. In the end I believe that the eating matters more than the exercise and it's harder to manage and maintain in the long haul.

2. It does matter how you lose weight. This is NOT a Jenny dig. But if you don't learn how to eat properly and you don't understand how to work out, you can't maintain the loss. If you depend wholly on Jenny to feed you, or you require on 20 hours of exercise a week, you might not really be ready to face the world alone ... in a jungle ... naked. I hope that makes sense. You can't continue those extremes forever. You have to UNDERSTAND calories, metabolism, your own habits and cravings. You have to have PLANS for when Jenny food isn't handy or you break your tibia ... or you get stuck in the jungle, naked, surrounded by PopTarts and Swedish Fish.

3. It's a journey. There will be ups and downs. Gains and losses. Tight pants and smaller sizes. There is no shame. There is just real life. Be patient. Do the right things often enough and good things happen. No one is perfect 100% of the time and nothing you do is going to ruin everything overnight.

Go get'em Kirstie and Valerie. What you're doing is hard, and you're choosing to do it in front of the whole world. Plenty of people will say nasty things about you and I admire the thickness of your skin as much as the circumference of your soon-to-shrink waistline. Your truth, the reality of your situation, gives us all ammunition for our own processes ... and maybe a little extra backbone.