Valerie Bertinelli and Kirstie Alley have shilled for diet company Jenny Craig, and now their newest spokesperson will be plus-sized actress Queen Latifah. The company says it wants to focus on a healthy lifestyle with Latifah’s ad campaign rather than go for a traditional weight-loss oriented campaign.
“We officially confirm that Queen Latifah will join the Jenny Craig program in January,” Scott Parker, Jenny Craig’s vice president of marketing, tells PEOPLE. “We are thrilled to have Queen Latifah support our mission of improving health by taking her first step toward achieving a more healthful lifestyle.”
Parker adds: “Queen Latifah joins forces with Jenny Craig to communicate the importance of how small lifestyle changes, in the areas of diet and exercise, can have positive effects on overall health.”
The Hairspray star, who has consistently celebrated her plus-size figure over the years (including a recent PEOPLE cover story), will have a “very different campaign, focused on a healthier lifestyle, not on getting onto a specific dress size,” says Parker.
[From People.com]
It sounds like they are embracing a positive body image and that’s excellent. Queen Latifah has always come across as a confident woman and if you don’t think too hard about it she’s a very good choice for a diet company spokesperson because she seems so normal and down to earth while she’s also able to be glamorous. The thing is, she also did voice-over ads for Pizza Hut in which she told us to “Gather round the good stuff” and stuff our faces, not go for a walk or eat a salad.
There was also a story last year that she attended the opening of a “Fat Burger” restaurant in Miami and sung the fast food chain’s praises, saying “That was part of my Los Angeles education. On Sundays in California everybody would come out in all these low-riders. FatBurger was, like, the centerpiece for it all.”
There’s nothing wrong with liking fast food or becoming a spokesperson for a pizza chain, but are people going to forget Latifah’s Pizza Hut commercials when she’s shilling for Jenny Craig? Maybe admitting you need a diet plan is just a natural extension of too much junk food.
Here’s one of Queen Latifah’s Pizza Hut ads. She’s the voice at the end.
Queen Latifah is shown at the American Music Awards on 11/18/07, thanks to PRPhotos.
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