Nicole Sullivan says stars like Jessica Alba lie about pregnancy-weight loss

"Cougar Town" star Nicole Sullivan is lashing out at celebrity moms who claim they lost all their pregnancy weight by being busy and breastfeeding for lying about the extreme lengths they go often go to to slim down.

"They all lie and say, 'Oh, I lost the weight running after the kids or breastfeeding.' It's not true!" Sullivan, 42, told Us. "I would flip through celeb magazines and I just couldn't get how these moms like Jessica Alba lost so much weight so quickly and yet I couldn't."

Nicole, who gave birth to her second child in 2009, says celebrities who don't tell the truth about their near-starvation diets and obsessive workouts do a disservice to regular women who often take up to a year to regain their pre-pregnancy bodies.

"I felt broken. I felt like an outsider in my own community," says Sullivan. "There just are not a lot of overweight people in Hollywood. I felt like the jerk who couldn't figure it out."

Nicole, who's a paid rep for Jenny Craig, says the trouble she had losing baby weight damaged her self-esteem and reduced the enjoyment she took in motherhood — something she now deeply regrets.

"When I look back to when I had my first son, I was unhappy," says Sullivan, who eventually slimmed down by eating less and exercising. "I couldn't understand why the weight wasn't just falling off. I wish I could have that time back.

"With my second son, I enjoyed the whole process of him being an infant more because I wasn't mad at myself. When you are mad at yourself, you are mad at everybody. That's the problem. I may not look like [Jessica Alba], but at least I can keep up with other actresses now. I feel really good about myself."

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