“I’m feeling myself right now,” Kandi Burruss says, standing up to point out off her missing waist. The singer-songwriter, reality TV personality, actress, entrepreneur and mom has lost rather a lot of weight this yr, and fans have noticed.

“I’m a foodie. “My weight has been going up and down for years,” she says. “Honestly, I have been trying to lose weight for the last year and a half. I had a goal of where I wanted to go, but I kept getting further away from it.”

Her recent departure didn’t help. With no cameras following her, she bounced back and gained much more weight for her final “Queens of R&B” tour with Xscape (in addition to SWV and special guests Mya, Total and 702). She found herself at a degree of frustration, including after using popular weight reduction methods that just weren’t working, a friend advisable she try Hydroxycut. It is advertised as “America’s #1 brand of weight loss supplements.” She used it years ago, “but I haven’t used it in a while.” The combination of an entire family of products, exercise, and adopting healthier eating habits worked, and to her surprise, it worked quickly.

“I’ve lost 31 pounds since May,” she says once we talk in October. The changes were so significant that her husband thought he was wearing a fat suit as a guest on the brand new season of the hit Hulu series.

“If you look at these episodes now? I knew I was a little heavier, but I didn’t realize how much heavier! This is madness.”

In addition to the results of Hydroxycut, changing her mindset also helped her shed extra pounds.

“I was just very motivated,” she says. “I thought I wouldn’t cheat. I’ll stick to taking it [Hydroxycut] twice a day. I’m going to change my eating habits. I stopped eating desserts, soda, and all that stuff.”

Doing this in preparation for and throughout the tour has helped her curb poor eating habits which might be common with tables of carb-heavy artisan foods all the time available backstage.

“I used to be drained of being fat. I literally saw someone write something negative about our outfits. They asked, “Why do they always look stuffed?” I said, “Oh no! Don’t tell me I’ll never look stuffed in this outfit again!’

These days, Burruss, who snacks on almonds between meals, avoids large breakfasts, replaces soda and lemonade with water and Hydroxycut Ultra Shred Sticks, and eats only meat and vegetables, is way from “stuffed.” For the primary time since her first season, the second season in 2009, she returned to the 130-pound weight class.

“I was there for 15 years, right,” she says with amusing. “If you can imagine, it was a life-changing experience for me. Until I did this, I didn’t know I needed it as much as I did. I think as women we kind of get used to the idea that, “Oh, I’m getting old. You should gain a few pounds…” I feel I kind of fell into that way of considering, although I actually didn’t.

She’s still determining her plans for the vacation season, which are sometimes stuffed with delicious spreads, sweets, and lots of opportunities for foodie pranks once January rolls around. But Burruss is decided to maintain all her labor going into 2025 and beyond.

“I’m still using Hydroxycut until I figure out a way to maintain the size,” she says. “I want to continue to exercise regularly and plan to do some fun activity to stay active because I need to see this body next summer!”

In our full conversation, Burruss also talks about how she’s “really enjoying life” since deciding to depart, raising her adult daughter Riley, who’s living her best post-college life in New York (“She stresses me out more than any of my other kids.” ) and more. Watch the total chat above. Hydroxycut is out there on the brand’s website and at popular retailers including Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and Amazon.

Making decisions about our health is a posh and sometimes difficult process.

In addition to our own attitudes, experiences, and perspectives, we’re inundated with information from others (friends, family, health care professionals) and from external sources (news or social media) about what it means to be healthy.

Sometimes this information is consistent with what we take into consideration our own health. Other times it could go against our beliefs. To complicate matters further, sometimes this information is intentional misinformation.

How can we make sense of all this when making decisions about our health? What determines whether we stick to our attitude or change our mind?

Most of us can probably relate to this. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have had to change a lot of our behaviors to slow the spread of the virus. This meant working from home, wearing a mask, staying in our bubbles, and ultimately getting the vaccine.

Although for many individuals the choice to get vaccinated was obvious, for others it was not so easy. Tests from the period immediately before the Covid vaccine was available in New Zealand showed that a big minority were unsure or unlikely to be vaccinated.

They were mostly young, women and fewer educated, and their concerns were mainly about unknown future unwanted effects. Our latest research suggests that cognitive (mental) flexibility may have something to do with attitudes towards vaccinations.

Flexible mind

Previous research suggests that mental flexibility plays a very important role in decision-making. Imagine changing the best way you do something at work, having a discussion with someone who has a unique opinion, or being told that you must make healthier decisions (e.g. exercise more).

Some people handle these situations with ease. Others have a harder time adapting. Mental flexibility describes this ability to adjust our attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors within the face of recent or changing information.

Research shows that mental flexibility affects how our opinions are extremewhat’s the probability that we’ll do that consider in disinformation or “fake news,” whether or not we do it pro-ecological decisions or get entangled health-promoting behaviors (for instance, sun protection or exercise).

To increase vaccination coverage, governments often use educational campaigns that emphasize the security, effectiveness and importance of vaccinations. However, these campaigns it doesn’t all the time work out in reducing the sensation of uncertainty about vaccinations.

We wanted to know why and thought mental flexibility might play a job. To discover, we surveyed 601 New Zealanders about their opinions and experiences of vaccination.

Some questions asked about external aspects, resembling how easy they thought it was to access vaccines or whether or not they could purchase vaccines. Other questions focused on internal aspects, resembling personal beliefs about vaccinations, perceptions of their very own health, and the way necessary or secure they think vaccines are.

Overall, our participants reported few external barriers to vaccination, and 97% said vaccines were available or inexpensive. These percentages are promising and should reflect government values further efforts to make it easier to get the vaccine.

In comparison, internal aspects played a bigger role in vaccine uncertainty or hesitancy. Specifically, almost 1 / 4 (22%) of participants reported concerns about health risks related to vaccines. And 12% said they didn’t trust the processes or individuals who developed the vaccines.

Testing adaptive behavior

We also asked our participants to play a game designed to measure mental flexibility.

It involved matching cards based on a certain rule – for instance, match cards with the identical variety of objects. This rule modified randomly throughout the sport, which meant that participants had to adjust their behavior throughout the sport.

Interestingly, individuals who found it harder to adapt to regulatory changes (meaning they’d lower levels of mental flexibility) also reported more internal barriers to vaccination.

For example, after we divided participants into two groups based on their mental flexibility, the low flexibility group was 18% more likely to say that vaccinations were inconsistent with their beliefs. They were 14% more likely to say they didn’t trust vaccines and 11% more likely to report concerns about negative unwanted effects of vaccines.

This didn’t apply to external aspects. Mental flexibility didn’t predict whether people believed that vaccines were available and inexpensive.

Information is usually not enough

These results suggest that making decisions about our health – including whether or not to get vaccinated – is dependent upon greater than just receiving the “right” information.

Simply talking in regards to the importance of vaccinations will not be enough to change attitudes or behaviors. It also is dependent upon every person’s unique cognitive style – the best way they perceive and process information.

Since then, falling vaccination rates have been an issue all over the world, including in New Zealand long before the pandemic. Our findings suggest that health education campaigns could also be more practical in the event that they consider the role of cognitive flexibility.

One technique is to change the best way information is framed. For example, as a substitute of simply presenting facts in regards to the safety or importance of vaccinations, educational campaigns can encourage us to query our own perspectives or to imagine alternative realities by asking “what if?” questions.

Tests shows that any such framing can engage our deliberative thought processes (those that help us think deeply and critically), increase mental flexibility, and ultimately make us more open to change.

When K. Michelle recalls what led her to inject silicone into her buttocks over six years ago, the singer and tv personality says she felt it was something she needed to reach music.

“I had just signed a new record deal and I felt like the bigger the butt, the bigger the career,” she tells ESSENCE. “I already had a big butt. It was just ridiculous.”

The star couldn’t have predicted that she would talk about how the injections almost killed her. After trying to remove the silicone, she discovered it had spread throughout her body and was having harmful effects, including on her ability to walk. It took the singer years and multiple surgeries to get to where she is now, claiming she’s “probably the healthiest I’ve ever seen her.”

After going through this ordeal, K began working on making a program to help individuals with similar experiences. The result’s a brand new series, the official premiere of which can happen on February 3.

“Several people have gone through this and are just starting to feel the effects,” he says of the people in the series who want to correct mistakes after plastic surgery and whom he tries to help. “You even have women who have recently had this procedure and are feeling the effects right away.”

As the popularity of plastic surgery continues to grow, K says more conversations need to be had about the proven fact that many trips under the knife don’t end as planned.

“You only see beauty and you only see stories… after they photoshopped their bodies to death outside of surgery,” he says. “I wanted to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about this.”

The series may even feature her ongoing journey towards health and happiness together with her body. Because silicone won’t ever be completely faraway from the body, she pays attention to her body, including what she introduces through her food plan, in a way she hasn’t in the past. When it comes to accepting where she is physically now, she truthfully admits that she struggles with the desire to undergo plastic surgery in the future.

“I am faced with a difficult decision. My doctor thinks I will probably need two more reconstructions, and they will be for cosmetic reasons, not health reasons. That’s why I fight,” he says. “Sometimes I think, ‘I’ll never come back to this table!’ But then I can put something on and then the reconstruction dent appears and I say, “I’m going to fix it.” I am human. I go back and forth.”

She adds: “I like the way I look. I feel pretty. I feel hopeful and comfortable that I’m healthy and able to function. I believe this brings one other beauty. I believe I actually have a grown woman inside me and I believe she’s beautiful, so I’m on the right path to what I believe about myself.”

However, that does not stop social media from claiming that she already had the job done, which the star only addressed in the comical way she could.

“You know how people dressed you? They subjected me to surgeries,” he says. “I had a facelift on Monday and on Wednesday I have a new face. Let them tell them, it’s always something.”

That being said, despite what people might imagine or expect from watching , K is against plastic surgery. He just wants everyone to concentrate on the risks and do their research before deciding to go on the operating table.

“I’m all for what you want to do with your body. It’s something we have to do called research, and even within the research we can still decide that we don’t expect the result. It’s just surgery and it’s something you just have to mentally prepare for and understand,” he says. “Know your medical history and what you’re going through. How does your body react to things before you go under the knife? It’s really a self-study. It’s nothing quick, you just get up and do it. Similar to researching When you want to buy a car, you should definitely consider what you are going to do with your life and body, because you only get one.”

Read more of our conversation with K. Michelle about her health journey, recent music (including her latest R&B album and first country album), her debut movie role on Lifetime’s and why you’ll be able to’t put a star in a box.