Rev. Al Sharpton Drops Pounds As Fast as MSNBC Drops Viewers

The Rev. Al Sharpton has never met a camera he didn't like, he used to be the same with sweets.

And while Rev. Al will never give up his appetite for the spotlight, he did give up the sweets.

Even at his own birthday party at the Four Seasons, Sharpton did not have one bite of his own birthday cake.

It’s not simply that he hasn’t had any sweets in years. He hasn’t had dinner in years, either.

The NY Daily News says you can 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.

“I’m conditioned now so that I never get hungry,” he explained.

Read more on his diet at the NY Daily News