When told he was pre-diabetes, Alec Baldwin, the frequent host of Saturday Night Live, and star of 30 Rock star immediately gave up sugar and carbs, lost weight and managed to get his blood sugar under control.
The actor said that he had always been thin and believed he was doing all the right things health-wise. “I’m a vegetarian. I’m a pescetarian if you will. And I was beginning to really, really blow up here, you know?” The 58-year-old Alec Baldwin lamented, noting that, despite his vegetarian diet he ceased to look like the svelte leading man of his early acting days when he began to look bloated, and out of shape during his time on 30 Rock.
And in 2011, Baldwin’s doctor told him that he was pre-diabetic. The celebrity said the diagnosis was a shock that led to a drastic change in his diet.
“I stopped eating refined sugars, desserts, and sweets,” he says, admitting that it was tough going at first. When he gave up sugar… he said it was like pushing a toboggan along a track to eventually get down the slope following his diagnosis in May 2011, he confessed on his NPR podcast, Here’s the Thing. “By the time I get to July and August, we’re going downhill and the weight’s just coming off me.”
Baldwin dropped 30 pounds in just four months. But it wasn’t just sugar that he abandoned, he also cut out carbs, especially pasta. Before his diagnosis, the actor said he was eating mega doses of carbohydrates. “I would eat, you know, the fish-tank-size bowl of pasta.”
His wife since 2012, Hilaria Thomas is a yoga instructor, and Baldwin confesses that her support has helped him stay fit, claiming that yoga and pilates have really changed him.
He’s lost so much weight, he jokes, that the problem now is none of his clothes fit. If he puts his hands in his pockets, he swears his pants fall down!