Like Alexandra Daddario and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Zac Efron was in incredibly great shape for his role in “Baywatch,” but to achieve those results, the actor may have pushed himself to a level exceeding his co-stars. At the time, Efron was all for putting the work in, as he told Men’s Journal, “There’s this trigger that happens after two or three weeks of dieting and eating healthy food, where your body switches its primary energy source from burning mainly carbohydrates to burning fat.”
The actor relished the process because it would make him crave foods he should be eating (like sweet potatoes, beets, and kale) instead of the junk that would just make his body goals harder to accomplish. On the other hand, the extreme steps it took to maintain the chiseled abs of a Greek god were eventually not worth it. A few years after the film was released, Efron admitted to Men’s Health, “I started to develop insomnia, and I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time. Something about that experience burned me out. I had a really hard time recentering.”
Despite the dark moments, Efron learned a lot from that experience and now fully understands what it truly takes to have almost no body fat. Clearly, he appreciated the lessons learned, yet will probably never go through a transformation that intense again.
