By Elettra Mathews, CNN • Updated 9th February 2019
No, Donna D’Errico will not be the next “Baywatch” star. (Sorry, Ronda Rousey.)
But the 48-year-old actress, singer and model has just revealed what she did to turn back the clock, and it’s totally refreshing.
“I started listening to my body,” D’Errico told CNN on February 3. “I stopped cooking for myself. I’m totally a non-dairy, grain-free, vegan, diabetic woman!”
It’s fitting that D’Errico — who played Pamela Anderson’s love interest C.J. Parker on the 1990s hit television series — should take such a strict approach to her diet.
Her crusade against food has been a long time coming.
“I’ve been very vegetarian/vegan for 30 years,” she explained. “It was a lifestyle for me. I’d tell my friends, ‘Listen, don’t even think about eating meat.’ We had nothing left to buy for Thanksgiving. ‘Don’t even think about eating any animal products!'”
D’Errico, who now splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, found that turning away from animal products not only gave her a healthy, nutritious lifestyle, but actually improved her job prospects.
“I started to see on magazines, you have to actually eat correctly. A lot of women, once they get pregnant, they think they need meat, dairy and gluten,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you are eating if you don’t eat well. If you eat well, you are obviously capable of doing a wonderful job, regardless of size.”
In 2016, D’Errico told Harper’s Bazaar, “I don’t eat at certain restaurants, like Italian… You see the calorie counts and if I’m up to 4,000 that night, I am going to stay home and eat pasta.”