A whole new Drew! Drew Barrymore opened up to Us Weekly exclusively at Refinery29's Los Angeles Holiday Party at Sunset Tower Hotel's Terrace on Wednesday, Dec. 10, and dished on how she's working to shed the pounds she gained after the birth of her second child.
Barrymore, 39, welcomed daughter Frankie this past April with husband Will Kopelman. Frankie joins big sister Olive, 2. The Hollywood veteran told Us that giving birth — and taking care of two little ones — was not easy on her body, and she's now working to slim down.
"Oh god, I just started to work out," the actress spilled. "I went down the rabbit hole. After two kids I just ate everything and I looked like a marsupial. It was bad. I could fold my stomach over my pants — big time — not like, a little. Not like, 'Oh I've got muffin top.' I was like, 'Here is like a large pizza folded over my jeans.'"
"It's the making babies thing!" Barrymore explained of the weight gain. "You get so caught up with making babies that you just eat everything. You're just like, 'Oh screw it at this point. It's such a disaster, why not go the whole thing?'"
As 2014 comes to a close and New Year's resolutions are around the corner, Barrymore — who serves as the Editor-at-Large for Refinery29 — is now focusing on her health.
"I'm starting to try to pull it back together," she said. "You know, it takes nine months to build it, it should take nine months to unbuild it. You shouldn’t start really ever beating yourself up until after nine months. If you need to do a little diet and exercise at that point maybe start, but just give yourself some time. It doesn’t happen overnight. I don’t know why we expect this of ourselves."
"How about the breastfeeding myth?" the former child star continued, joking about the many celebs who say they shed their post-baby weight simply by breastfeeding their newborn. "'My baby's drinking all the weight!' It's like, 'Wow! How nice!' I’m going to Tracy Anderson and I love it. I love music and cardio. It's like a sober nightclub over there."
One part of her body that Barrymore may not be able to immediately get back with Tracy Anderson classes is her feet, which she calls "hocks of meat" as they are "tenderized and broken and disproportionate."
"They do go back but it's not the same [after] the entire process," she said of her feet. "I was a six and I went to an eight and a half! Now I’m at a seven but the sevens are starting to not fit but I’m not a six and a half yet, so it’s a lot of in-between. It’s weird. It’s not pretty!"
While the mom to two is having some growing pains with her post-pregnancy body, Barrymore happily gushes about her two little ones and the relationship the girls have with one another.
"Every day is different," she observed. "One day [Olive] loves [little sister Frankie] — it's not even 'day,' it's 'hour.' One hour it's like, 'I love you, you're the best little sister,' and the next minute it's like, 'Kid, you're stepping on my territory.' I imagine it's like that for all siblings and all parents, you know. You kind of gush about the good but it's a tricky journey, you're trying to keep everybody feeling like number one but there's two."
"It's hard," Barrymore admitted. "I never lie though. I'm never like, 'I can do everything and it's easy.' It's super hard and s–t has to fall off the table because I cannot personally do everything. I have to prioritize and I really compartmentalize. Sometimes life isn't that perfect and it's messy and everything needs to be done on the same day. You just kind of know when you're working too much and you're not with the kids enough, and you know when you've done nothing but be with your children and you're like, 'Companies are totally falling apart' because you haven't paid any attention to them. You try to balance it and it's not easy. In fact, I think it's very hard. But you do it, you know? Because I want my daughters to see the fact that I earn a living and that's what they're going to have to do and everything is by example."
