Mariah Carey is the Shape magazine May covergirl  – and she looks amazing. Inside the singing superstar talks about her 11 month old twins Morrocan Carey-Cannon and Monroe Carey-Cannon with husband Nick Cannon. The 42 year old also explains how she lost 70 pounds after the babies were born.

Mariah wanted children for a long time but this celebrity Mom is candid about the trials of pregnancy. She tells the magazine it wasn’t a blissful nine months ‘Pregnancy was probably the best and the hardest thing I’ll ever go through. I know for a lot of women, it can be wonderful and relatively easy. But for me, it was like ‘Okay, honey, do you have to do everything the hard way?’.

The Mom of two explains how her growing belly was a big talking point ‘Everyone said I was fat, so I did something about it. I put on around 70 lbs., but if you look at photos of me when I was pregnant, you’d say, ‘Wow, she gained 9,000 pounds!’ A lot of it was water weight because I pretty much had head-to-toe edema, which is very painful.’

The Grammy award winner turned to Jenny Craig to shift the baby weight ‘I used to be able to slim down just by exercising more, but that’s changed. Since having the babies, I realize that 90 percent of losing weight is my diet.’ So how does she maintain her figure? ‘Today my workout routine is more about getting and staying toned. And for me, that means either taking hour-long walks a few times a week or jumping in the pool three or four days a week to do 45 minutes of aquatic exercises.’