When I started filming ‘2 Broke Girls,’ I actually was broke, so I was eating all the junk food they kept on set. But then I developed a skin rash that lasted over six months. The doctors said that it was due to stress, my diet, and lack of exercise.
I freak out if I go a little too long without being in the gym. For a long time it was all about getting the weight off because I was 240 pounds at my heaviest, and now I’m around 175, so the majority of that weight loss was due to diet and exercise.
In money, and in life, you are very often your own worst enemy. You promise yourself you’re going to diet, then eat not one or two French fries but a whole plate. You decide to really commit to saving for retirement, only to wind up with a new pair of shoes in your closet.
Unfortunately, diet is 75 or 80 percent of trying to get in shape, so you do have to try to cut the carbs. The diet’s a huge part! I’m from Kansas, so I love ranch dressing and McDonald’s. When I’m working, I have to stay away from all that!
It starts with your diet and then to your exercise… you have to make the right decisions as a consumer and learn about carbs and proteins as well as watching your portion control, and from there you have to stay active as much as possible.
In L.A., I get a meal delivery service called Diet Designs. I like a nice butter lettuce salad with some avocado, fresh grapefruit, shredded chicken breast and raw almond slices with a sesame vinaigrette dressing. I also love juicing and am kind of obsessed with it.
At around 20 years old, I started to educate myself on nutrition. I’m so grateful that I taught myself the importance of health and fitness in my early twenties. I created a lifestyle that I love, and because of that, I’ve never had to diet.
Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt – an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there’s a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it’s really, really hard, and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard.
As a late teenager, I had some puppy fat on me, and I noticed that I could put on weight. I have always been very disciplined because my mother was very beautiful, a very pretty woman, but she was immobilised by obesity. At her biggest, she was about 17 stone. And she was always on some sort of fad diet.
The information diet of a senior campaign staffer is insane. We were all addicted to our chosen email delivery devices and were aggressively tethered to them. It made sense and wasn’t an issue during the campaign because of the importance of the situation. However, once the campaign was over and we were successful, the information flow dried up.
Almost as soon as I went vegan, people started telling me that my skin looked great, and that I appeared younger, slimmer, and healthier. I’m convinced that of all the changes I’ve made to my lifestyle, it’s the adoption of a vegan diet that has been best for me – physically, mentally, and certainly spiritually.
When I learned that flour pound for pound has as many calories as sugar, and that when eating pasta you’re basically eating cake, I was size 23, and my neck was restricting my breathing, and so I got on a microbiotic diet and got myself an exercise bike.
Excess dietary salt is most notorious for increasing blood pressure. Americans have a 90 percent lifetime probability of developing high blood pressure – so even if your blood pressure is normal now, if you continue to eat the typical American diet, you will be at risk.
Our pets rely on us entirely for their nutrition. So if you’re making your own judgments, that could lead to a mistake. At the same time, we have more control over our pet’s diet than we do with our children or with ourselves, so your vet can tell you what is appropriate for your dog and you can assign them that.
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.
The whole idea of juicing is good if you are trying to diet and use it in limited basis. I use juice drinks only once a week. I use emulsified drinks because in emulsification you are keeping everything. You are keeping the pulp, you are keeping the skin with all of the phytonutrients.
Never in a million years would I want to live at Versailles with Marie Antoinette or anybody else. I hate to tell you this but I did not even like visiting Versailles. I found it just too ornate. It was like a complete diet of cotton candy, marzipan, and whipped cream.
If you hunger for certain types of clothes, for which you have little use, put yourself on a diet. Just as you resist too much whipped cream and French pastry to keep your figure in shape, you can say no to those yearned-for but unneeded purchases that lead to a wardrobe that is shapeless and without form.
But I can only take so much TV, because there is so much advice. I find people will preach about virtually anything – your diet, how to live your life, how to improve your golf. The lot. I have always had a thing against the Mister Know-It-Alls.
It’s never fun having to bulk up for a job on an action film, then lose weight for another role. I don’t actually mind working out, but it’s the diet: I’m half-French, so I love my food, and boiled chicken breast for breakfast is not my idea of a good meal.
It was when my American coach Dan Pfaff came over from the States in 2009 and started working with me that we really began to look at my diet. He decided I was eating too many carbohydrates, so I cut back on bread. Over the next year I lost weight and became leaner.
After working with many nutritionists, reading books, and practicing trial and error on my own body, I have finally found a way to control my weight without deprivation. I call my program ‘Somersizing,’ and Somersizing is not a diet. Diet is a nasty four-letter word that conjures up negative thoughts of sacrifice and obsession and guilt.
I put on fifteen pounds of muscle, so that was a lot of eating chicken and a high protein, low-carb diet. Also a lot of heavy lifting and a very different kind of training with an ex-navy SEAL guy who wanted to kill me every time I got with him. In a good way.
I grew up with the Blind Boys’ music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
If you eat a lot of starchy foods, introduce a vegetable once a week, then twice a week, and then three times a week. Slowly fill your diet with new flavors. By the time you’re ready to let go of whatever it is you want to let go of, you’ve got a full menu.
