After suffering from a near-fatal heart attack back in 2012, Rosie O'Donnell is looking good and feeling even better.
The 52-year-old actress and television personality recently lost nearly 50 pounds, following her vertical sleeve gastrectomy procedure last year. O'Donnell talked about her weight loss, as well as trying to stay away from sweets in a new interview with Access Hollywood.
"I had a thing called the vertical gastric sleeve. It's very different than when you think of bypass surgery. It's newer," Rosie told Access Hollywood. "They remove two-thirds of your stomach but everything else stays intact, and as a result of that you can't hold as much food. But the very interesting part is that in that other two-thirds are where all the hunger hormones live. There's a technical name. It starts with a g, it sounds like gremlins... that's the biggest surprise, is that you're not hungry, right?"
O'Donnell said she used surgery as a tool to lose 44 pounds, but admitted that it was not an answer to her weight problem. "The Foster" actress also had to change the way she ate completely.
"It's a tool, it's not an answer," she told Access Hollywood. "You can't just get surgery and go 'I'm done' and keep eating the way you did. You have to change the way you eat, you have to exercise. It's a lot slower than it was at the beginning."
The former "The View" co-host added: "Sexy? No. I feel better that like my tummy's not in the way, you know, when everybody's naked. But no. I feel maybe less shame a little bit."
The actress compared her addiction to sweets to being an alcoholic. O'Donnell, who was pre-diabetic before surgery, now follows a sugar-free diet. At a screening of her new HBO documentary The (Dead Mothers) Club on Thursday, O'Donnell told People that "eating right is still a daily struggle."
"I read in a magazine article that sugar is eight times more addictive than heroin," she said. "Because of giving up sugar, I walk past one of those kiosks selling newspapers and I'm like, 'There's the Swedish Fish. They're right there.' Almost like how alcoholics can't go into a bar. They want to grab the bottle, I want to do that with the Swedish Fish."
