Now that she’s slimmed-down, is previously portly singer Jennifer Hudson substituting fashion for food?

Since dropping from a size 16 to a size 4, the Oscar winner has turned into a card-carrying shopaholic, snitches close to J-Hud divulge on the pages of the Dec. 20 issue of The National Enquirer.

“She not only buys clothes, she picks up items for their home, and always something for the baby,” according to a well-placed Enqurier snoop. “Jennifer will see a commercial for something on TV and scream ‘I have to have it!’ Then she’ll go on the Internet to find it.”

Could this be an emotional defense mechanism for dealing with the tragic triple homicide that robbed Jen of her mother, brother, and nephew.

“Each city we go to, my suitcase won’t hold my new clothes, so we have to box them up and ship them home,” Jennifer laughed in a recent interview. “Then I get back and want to try on everything I bought, so clothes are just everywhere,” she added. “It got to a point where I could barely get in my bedrom. And when did I realize I had a problem? Well, my bed is a canopy. I had no-where else to throw the clothes. So I threw them on top of the canopy!”

An age-old affliction for many a fashion-forward femme fatale has become a source of consternation between Hudson and her wrestler “baby daddy” David Otunga. Money ain’t a thing, sources say. The young family has plenty of that. It’s the materialism attached to Jennifer’s sprees that bother David, who is a Harvard-educated attorney by trade.

“David seriously thinks Jennifer needs to get help,” says a friend of the couple. “He thought her power shopping was just a phase, but now it’s cause problems between them. After Jennifer lost the baby weight, he knew she’d have to buy new clothes, but now he feels she’s become obsessed with material things.”

David recently sat Jennifer down to discuss her fixation with shopping.

“They watched the TV show Hoarders recently and discussed how shopping can become a problem. Jennifer agreed she’d try to restrain herself.”