The Incredible Shrinking Sharpton:

How Rev. Al lost 175 pounds

There were 60 candles on the cake — but none of it in Al Sharpton’s stomach.

Even at his own birthday party at the Four Seasons this month, surrounded by the governor, the mayor and Aretha Franklin, the Rev didn’t take a bite of the sugary treat.

It’s not simply that 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.”

 

   Sharpton Breakfast                     Sharpton Lunch

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 was absolutely content just doing the salad,” he said. “As a kid who grew up chubby, I just marveled at the fact that I could be thin.”

His doctor was not so content and told Sharpton to add green juice, a banana and three slices of plain whole wheat toast to the mix.

He’s a shadow of his former self — and that former self certainly cast a wide shadow. When he emerged as a civil rights activist during New York’s race-relations nadir of the mid-1980s, Sharpton marched for justice looking like a velour-covered beach ball.

In Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, Crown Heights and after the shooting of Amadou Diallo, there was Sharpton, an irresistible force in a massive track suit and a shiny medal, his oversized gut threatening to deflect attention from his cause.

He has been charged and acquitted of tax evasion, stabbed in the chest during a protest, sent to prison for protesting on a Navy base, and run for President — and always remained a larger-than-life figure. He’s still larger than life, but his figure no longer is.

Before dawn, Sharpton wolfs down his breakfast, one slice after the next, like a man who hasn’t eaten anything in 11 hours. Which, of course, he hasn’t, since he no longer eats anything after 6 p.m.

The reverend doesn’t drink coffee. Instead he prefers a mug of Twinings English Breakfast Tea, sweetened to the max with three packets of stevia. His green juice comes from Juice Press.

He eats standing up, watching the early-early-morning news on MSNBC.

“I always beat the sun up in the morning,” he said. “It’s the secret to why I’m double trouble.”

He credits his mentor, the late James Brown, with teaching him the lesson of self-control, though he learned it late in life.