I Got This
Authors: Jennifer Hudson
JENNIFER
HUDSON
I GOT THIS
How I Changed My Ways and
Lost What Weighed Me Down
DUTTON
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, January 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © 2012 by JHud Productions, Inc.
Weight Watchers recipes copyright © Weight Watchers International, Inc. Printed with permission.
All insert photographs, unless otherwise stated, are courtesy of the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hudson, Jennifer, 1981–
I got this : how I changed my ways and lost what weighed me down / Jennifer Hudson.
p.cm.
EISBN: 9781101565780
1. Hudson, Jennifer, 1981–2. Singers—United States—Biography.3. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.4. Overweight persons—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
ML420.H835A3 2012
782.42164092—dc23
[B]
2011043578
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Walbaum MT Std
Designed by Alissa Amell
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
____________________________
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
To my cousin Angela White—who is the ultimate health fanatic, my workout buddy, and a huge part of my inspiration.
CHAPTER FIVE
I’M YOUR
DREAMGIRL
…
CHAPTER SIX
AND I AM TELLING YOU I’M NOT GOING
“
J
ennifer! Over here!”
“Jennifer, look this way.”
“Jennifer, Jennifer.”
“Over here!”
“No, over here!”
“Jennifer, turn to the right!”
I always dreamed of someday walking the red carpet in Hollywood. Let’s be real. It’s fun. Everyone there is shouting out your name just to get a glimpse of what you’re wearing. The press asks you to pose, wave, and smile as they snap photo after photo, with flashes popping so bright you can hardly see. It’s a moment in time a girl feels truly beautiful. And on this particular night, I thought I was looking fierce.
It was one of my first red-carpet events. I was a contestant on
American Idol
, and was living my dream of singing for millions of people on the highest-rated show on television. I was a long way from singing in church and talent shows on the South Side of
Chicago. I was excited, taking in the red-carpet finery for the first time. I felt on top of the world.
“Jennifer, are you insecure about being a ‘big girl’ in Hollywood?”
That is, until
that
question.
Oh,
hell
no. She didn’t just ask me that.
But she did.
It took me a minute to figure out who the reporter was actually talking to.
Who, me? I thought. Insecure?
Surely, she wasn’t addressing
me
that way. I had the height of a supermodel, breasts that were naturally big
and
real, and a God-given shape. Why would I feel insecure about that? I looked around hoping to spot another Jennifer—an insecure “big” girl, but there wasn’t anyone else there.
Nope.
Just me.
Like Randy Jackson said to me after my
American Idol
audition: “Welcome to Hollywood, girl!”
BELIEVE
I
was born on September 12, 1981, in the Englewood area of Chicago. I am the third child of my parents, Darnell Hudson Donnerson and Samuel Simpson. My mama raised me, my sister Julia, and my brother Jason on her own as a single parent. We were a close family, surrounded by lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, and our grandparents.
I come from the South Side of Chicago, where a lot of the girls have curves. Most of the men there don’t want their ladies too skinny. Oh, no. They want a little meat on the bones, and a little something to hold on to. Most of the girls in my neighborhood were built just like me—and that’s what we wanted. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have my share of nice curves than no shape at all. That’s not to say that I didn’t know I was
bigger than some girls—I just never really felt all that insecure about it.
My sister, Julia, has been a big girl for her entire life. My brother, Jason, was built exactly the same.
As for me?
Comparatively speaking, I was the skinny one in my family! In fact, I was so thin as a little girl that you could see my ribs beneath my shirts. My mama took me, not Julia and Jason—the heavy kids in our family—to the doctor. She thought something had to be wrong.
“My child must be very sick! I can see her ribs!” Mama spoke desperately to the doctor as if I was dying. I wasn’t sick and I surely wasn’t dying—I was just
thin
.
In my family, if you were too skinny, something
had
to be wrong. My family likes to see some shape, too, and if you don’t have that, they’ll feed you until you do. And trust me—when it comes to food, the Hudsons don’t play around.
Like a lot of families in my neighborhood, food was a central focus for all types of gatherings, from family reunions to Sunday-night dinners. There were, of course, the exceptions, and I grew up knowing kids from school who were rarely served home-cooked meals—they ate TV dinners and frozen vegetables—but that wasn’t our family. My mama would never allow that kind of food in our house. She loved to cook. I never knew times were tough or that money was short in our home because Mama always had a hot
meal on the table. And if she cooked it, we ate it. My grandma and mama were the best cooks, and later, Jason became a good cook, too. Not me—I didn’t start cooking much until I got older and had a family of my own.
It gave my mama a lot of joy to make meals for her kids. She especially loved making hot breakfasts so we could start our days off right and nourished. Before school, we filled our plates with bacon, ham or sausage, pancakes, waffles, eggs, and biscuits. I said
nourished…
not healthy! But oh, that food was so good.
When it came time for dinner, meals were always prepared fresh and from scratch, too. We were a family of tradition and creatures of habit, so Wednesday was spaghetti night, Friday was always our fried fish night, and Sunday was strictly about praising God, spending time with family, and eating really good food. We’d all go to church in the morning and then stop someplace after service for a bite to eat for lunch. Sundays were the only day of the week that we ate out. It was a special treat I looked forward to every week. My grandma and mama loved to stop at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but we kids always wanted to eat at McDonald’s. I usually ordered a cheeseburger with
no
onions—I hated onions as a kid and still do. If my burger came with onions, I’d sit there, cry, and refuse to eat it until my mama picked the onions off—or my brother ate my burger for me.
Whenever we ate out, I nitpicked my meal so I could make it last longer, and I was a slow eater, anyway. Eating out was that
much of a treat. We weren’t allowed to order a drink because it cost too much money. Mind you, this was before the days of value meals, so everything on the menu was à la carte. Jason told my mama that if he didn’t have a drink he’d throw up his food. That was his way of being slick to get himself a drink. It worked every time, too.
Sunday nights were full-on family-style dinners with all the fixings. Those meals were like a traditional Christmas dinner at my mama’s house every week, with most of my favorite foods being served—collard greens, creamy mashed potatoes, pork chops with heavy gravy, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken with biscuits, and more. Just talking about those meals takes me back to the days of mindless eating without a care. And when it came to dessert, Mama made the best peanut butter cookies and pound cake on the planet. Everyone loved her pound cake. It tasted like she used at least two pounds of butter. For that reason alone, we should have called it “two pound cake.” All that butter made it taste so much better.
One thing is for sure: We ate very well seven days a week. It wasn’t just at my mama’s house that we ate this way. It was at Grandma’s house and our aunts’ houses, too. I always ate my fill, but I hardly ever finished all of the food I piled on my plate back then. My brother didn’t mind, though, because he got to eat all of my leftovers.
When we weren’t eating those delicious meals, my granddaddy used to spoil us with goodies from the gas station where he worked.
He frequently brought home chips, candy, and other special treats. On payday, he gave each of us some money to walk to the store and pick out all of the junk food we wanted. We loved when Granddaddy got paid because Mama only gave us a quarter when we wanted to buy something special. If I asked for fifty cents, it was as if I was trying to rob a bank.