14 DAY TRIAL // Kirstie Alley and partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy didn’t win the latest season of Dancing With the Stars on ABC, but they came pretty close to it, as runner-ups. There’s an upside to that too, Kirstie says, pointing to how much weight she’s lost.
Shortly after she confirmed she would be putting on her dancing shoes for DWTS, Kirstie pointed out that this was just the type of thing she needed to bounce back into shape.
At 60 and with the kind of weight struggles she’s had throughout the years, the actress more than accomplished her weight loss goal: she even surpassed it, dropping almost half her body weight during her sting on the show.
Speaking with Us Magazine after the season finale the other night, Kirstie did not sugarcoat the situation: she was upset they hadn’t won but she was happy with how she’d changed her life on the show.
It’s not just the extra pounds that she’s lost than make her efforts worth her while: she also found a new best friend in her partner Maks and she completely overhauled her life.
“My dress is half the size it was when we started. I have a lot more strength and stamina!” the actress gushes about the benefits of doing DWTS.
“I don’t feel like we won. I feel like we did amazingly and that’s an amazing thing but you want to win! And we didn’t win, so I can’t say that there isn’t a sadness about it,” she says with a tinge of regret.
If anything, Maks deserved to win: for the way he handled himself this season and, of course, for the things he managed to get her to do, which seemed nearly impossible when they first set off on their “mission.”
“[DWTS has] made me alive again. It’s given me a new view of what I want to do in my life,” Kirstie says.
“[Maks] had a long way to go with me and he pulled it off! So I wish we would have won. I wish he would have won, but when I look at what evolved from the first day to now, it’s almost impossible,” she adds.
Alley says her plan now is to stick to dancing to ensure that the pounds she dropped don’t come creeping back on.