As Britney Spears prepares to hit the road again next week for her second concert tour of North America in less than nine months, the pop superstar — and mother of two young sons— has managed to get her body looking the best it has since the days of “Ooops!… I Did It Again” and “I’m a Slave 4 U.” And Brit herself is thrilled with her own transformation.

A source tells OK! that Britney — who flaunted her toned physique in a barely there white Eres bikini for an Aug. 6 photo shoot in L.A. — is thrilled with her new figure.

“Britney used to hate her body when she looked in the mirror after having the boys,” a longtime pal of the singer tells OK!. “But last week she sent pictures home to [her mom] Lynne and wrote, ‘Look how good I look!’ ”

Melrose Place actor Ethan Erickson, who appears in Britney’s “Radar” music video and also worked on a Candie’s shoot with the performer, says she looked “dynamite” when they shot the company’s campaign several months ago. Of course, he’s even more impressed by her current bikini body. “I think the whole thing just screams, ‘I’m back,’ ” Ethan tells OK!.

The sexy mom of Sean, 3, and Jayden, 2, can credit her slamming new body in part to the Sunfare diet, a gourmet meal delivery company. Sunfare, which counts stars such as Eva Longoria Parker, Marcia cross and Khloe Kardashian among its fans, incorporates a balanced, low-carb approach of three big meals and two snacks per day, all documented through the delivery system.

SUBSCRIBE TO OK MAGAZINE!

“When Britney is on Sunfare, she consumes approximately 1,100 to 1,200 calories per day,” a source reveals to OK!.

The other major factor behind Brit’s renewed physique is good old-fashioned hard work in the dance studio and on stage.

“Her outlet is dance,” the longtime friend says. “She’s still dancing at least two hours a day and sometimes she’ll rehearse up to eight hours a day.”

Still, says another insider, “It didn’t come easy. It was a long, hard road. Britney dedicated herself in such a focused way. We are all so proud of her, not just for her physical achievements but also for her mental and emotional ones.”

Source

Fame

Even while he was on The Bachelorette trying to woo Jillian Harris, Ed Swiderski openly talked about having a girlfriend, former contestant Wes Hayden tells the new issue of Us Weekly (on newsstands now).

“Dave [Good] and I both remember Ed saying he had a girlfriend,” says Hayden, who also was accused of having a girlfriend while on the show. “But we are not the kind who are going to run our mouths.”

Finalist Reid Rosenthal tells Us Weekly some contestants knew Swiderski, 30, was bad news and “didn’t care to hang out with him.”

Adds Michael Stagliano, “There was definitely something, I can’t put my finger on it, where I did think, I’m not going to be best friends with this guy. Ed’s a shady character.”

SUBSCRIBE TO US WEEKLY!

Bachelorette contestants are required to relinquish cellphones and laptops on the show to keep interaction lively among the participants. But because of Swiderski’s job as a Microsoft consultant, he “had an agreement” to keep both “because it was imperative for him to have access for work,” castmate Jesse Kovacs tells Us Weekly.

While he did some work, he also kept in touch with girlfriend Lindsey Johnson, whom he told he was only going on the show for fun. As Us Weekly first reported last week, he even texted her that Harris wasn’t his “type.” (Us also reported that he slept with Johnson a week after proposing to Harris and tried to bed another woman, Bethany Steffen, a few days later.)

On April 12, three days before he told Harris he had to leave the show to focus on his career, Swiderski emailed Johnson “I love you.”

Says contestant Kovacs, “Obviously, no one knew he was saying, ‘I’m not into [Harris] and I can’t wait to go home.’”

Source

Fame

It’s that time of the year again — last week nominations were released for MTV’s star-studded and notoriously controversial Video Music Awards. But who should score a whooping seven nods, including the top category for Video of the Year? Britney Spears, y’all.

The songstress will be up against 2009’s hottest acts, Beyonce and Lady Gaga for the coveted prize, prompting numerous industry insiders to question if she really deserved such a slew of nominations for her one and only music video this year, Womanizer, in which she suggestively caresses her seemingly naked body, photocopies her bottom after stomping around a corporate office in a black wig and gets raunchy in the back of a car in her secret-service inspired get-up.

“We were surprised she got so many nominations because she has been ‘lip synching’ and while she is talented, the terrain has changed so this may be sympathy nominations because she is getting well,” said a key industry insider. “Every network is hurting for eyeballs. Britney always draws an audience.”

But let’s not forget that it was because of the troubled Tinseltowner’s sedated-like opening performance in 2007 that the VMAs surged into a whole new ratings stratosphere.

“When I first saw it I started to panic,” an MTV advertising executive told Tarts at the time. “But I soon realized that this was great, it was obviously going to get a lot of attention around the world.”

Last year, Brit was ratings-gold for the VMAs (viewership was up 41 percent from two years prior) thanks to her over hyped ‘comeback’ – although this time she didn’t have to sing and dance, she just had to gratuitously accept three moonmen for her musical abilities. Interestingly, those three VMAs were the first Spears had ever won although she had previously received 16 nominations. Her 1999 debut album “Baby One More Time” remains the highest-selling album by a female pop artist of all time but even then she only scored three nominations.

So does Brit really now deserve seven nods or is MTV trying to not-so-subtly steer Spears back to the stage, for better or for worse?

Her former music producer and good friend, the Grammy winning Dallas Austin, even admitted she was quite “a singer.”

“Britney is very normal, very average. She’s fun, she likes to play games, it’s sad because Hollywood makes you into a person that you don’t want to be,” Austin told us. “She can sing, but it’s different than being a singer and a person who can sing. The average person can sing pretty much, you can sing along to it in the car and you’ll probably be in the same pitch. But then there’s people who can’t sing, and they’re tone deaf and they can’t hear the pitch that the song is in. That’s a different story. Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Aaliyah - there are a lot of people with really great tones that aren’t going to sing like Celine Dion or Whitney Houston.”

Source, FamePics: Britney Spears shopping on Robertson Blvd. yesterday.

Fame

Disney has acquired screen rights to a new rendition of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” to be written and helmed by David Mamet, reports Variety. Mamet will also produce with Andrew Braunsberg.

The trade says that the film will be an amalgamation of the famed diary; the stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; and Mamet’s own original take on the material that could reframe the story as a young girl’s right of passage. Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, became an icon of the Holocaust after the post-war publication of the diary that she kept during the two years that her family hid in a secret attic apartment in Amsterdam.

A 1959 big screen rendition of Hackett and Goodrich’s “Diary of Anne Frank” earned an Oscar for Shelley Winters. The Anne Frank story has been told several times on TV, most recently ABC’s 2001 Emmy-winning mini “Anne Frank: The Whole Story.”

So who should play Anne? I think Saoirse Ronan would be genius. (She was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Atonement.)

Source