The incredible shrinking Sharpton: How Rev. Al lost 175 pounds (2014)

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ^ | October 28, 2014 | JUSTIN ROCKET SILVERMAN

[dennisw]

At age 60 and weighing 130, the once-rotund Sharpton is almost underweight, and he says he's never hungry. His 'secret': Less food, more exercise.

He hasn’t had any sweets in years. He hasn’t had dinner in years, either.

Call it “the Al Sharpton Diet,” but this once-rotund reverend has dropped from 305 pounds to exactly 129.6 pounds. The precise weight was recorded this week on Sharpton’s bedroom scale at 5 a.m., when the man of the (much less) cloth begins his day.

Sharpton has shed 60% of his much-mocked weight — and he did it without surgery, diet pills or a single Weight Watchers meeting.

“I could take all the cartoons in the tabloid newspapers, but I couldn’t take my daughter punching me in the belly and asking why I was so fat,” Sharpton recalled. “That was my inspiration to lose the weight. And probably the last time anyone hurt my feelings.”

That incident with his daughter happened nearly 15 years ago, when she was 12. But it wasn’t until more recently that Sharpton devised his strategy to drop the pounds — just stop eating.

That’s only a minor simplification.

Around six years ago, Sharpton cut out red meat. A year later, he did away with chicken — no small feat for a guy who ate fried fowl three times a day (with grits and eggs for breakfast and on a sandwich in the afternoon, plus a half-chicken for dinner).

Eventually he cut out so much food that he was subsisting on a single lunchtime salad (albeit with one perk: a chopped egg). That’s when the weight really started coming off, at a rate of about 2 pounds a week. And as he got thinner, he found he missed food less and less.

[trisham]

Yes, he probably has heart disease as a result of being previously obese, but anorexia causes heart problems as well.