Melissa Joan Hart: ‘I’ve Always Wanted To Be A Dancer’

Melissa Joan Hart showed off her bikini body on the cover of People magazine earlier this year after losing 40 pounds, but she told Access Hollywood recently that she’s been cheating on her eating routine in the run up to “Dancing With the Stars.”

Melissa, who recently moved with her family to Connecticut to be closer to her mother, who underwent brain surgery earlier this year related to a brain tumor, revealed the move took her off track.

“Moving to the East Coast and just… trying to like, juggle everything… I wasn’t eating on time, on a schedule, and because of that I was grabbing the wrong things,” Melissa told Access. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh, we haven’t eaten anything today. Let’s get some pizza.’ I think because of the stress of it all, I kept losing weight but not [in a] healthy [way].”

The former “Sabrina The Teenage Witch” star said she hasn’t exercised recently either.

“I haven’t worked out in about two weeks so we’ll see what this dancing will do to me,” she said. “I’m a little worried about my joints… I know a lot of people last year got hurt so I’m hoping that I can just be as healthy and fit as possible.”

Melissa recently found out her partner is two-time champ Mark Ballas and she is thrilled at the routines the ballroom pro is set to teach her.

“I’m just bracing myself for the kind of, you know, rigorous routine [coming my way],” she said. “For a few weeks, a few months I get to be a professional ballroom dancer and that’s going to be amazing and such hard work and I’m ready for it.”

Although she starred on Nickelodeon’s “Clarissa Explains It All” as a young girl, Melissa revealed she secretly always had the desire to dance.

“I’ve always wanted to be a dancer,” she said. “If you had asked me my entire life, ‘What do you, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I was, ‘I want to be dancer.’ It was never really, ‘I want to be an actress,’ even though I love being an actress and that is my career… This is my opportunity to get out there and actually perform… [To] dance with a pro and have to compete against pros in the actual costumes, in front of a live audience… This is everything I’ve always dreamed of in a condensed amount of time.”